R. Diez wrote: > > check out HEAD, it should always work Please stop using HEAD like this, you'll just confuse your coworkers (and yourself). HEAD denotes the currently checked out commit. [Unlike SVN it is *not* the most recent version of anything.] Thus by definition, 'git checkout HEAD' is a no-op. The newest commit on a branch is denoted by its branch name, because as Jens said, a branch is in fact a pointer to its tip[1] commit. > Now you're saying I cannot reliably checkout last week's versions > because yesterday I did a merge from an older branch? You mean that > git stores everything with clean graphs and numeric pointers, so it > cannot know what this repository looked like last week? Indeed. Especially if forced pushes are allowed, there is no way to know what was in the repo at a given time unless you have (local) reflogs enabled on remote branches and going back until the time you want. > As the developer, I have full control, I can decide what the > branches are called and how the public repository is > updated/pushed/whatever. I can control the clock so there are no > time skews. > > What do I have to do in order to be able to reliably checkout last > week's versions without too much administrative work? I just want to > get the same result today as if I had done a checkout last week from > the public repository and had made a back-up copy of the working > directory then. Assuming * you never do a non-fast-forward (i.e., forced) push * you never have any clock skew * you always merge features into master (not the other way around) * you always push immediately after committing on master you can get there by using 'git log -1 --first-parent --until=...' as mentioned in my first email. I personally think that's crazy and -- if you want to avoid the work of "really" using submodules -- support Jens's suggestion of having the buildbot automatically assemble an "I tested this" superproject. [1] or "head" in lowercase (thus "branch head"), but I prefer tip to avoid confusion -- Thomas Rast trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html