"Lars Hjemli" <hjemli@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> On 5/9/07, Junio C Hamano <junkio@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Lars Hjemli <hjemli@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
>>
>> > This teaches git-checkout to strip the prefix 'refs/heads/' from the
>> > supplied <branch> argument
>>
>> Why is this necessary, may I ask?
>>
>
> I'm playing around with a gui frontend, and there I use
> git-for-each-ref to obtain possible arguments for git-checkout. That's
> how I discovered the 'problem', and solved it by stripping
> 'refs/heads/' in my frontend.
Pathspec-less variant of "git checkout" takes two kinds of
parameters and has two flavours in its behaviour:
(1) an exact branch name, in which case it switches to the
branch; otherwise
(2) any arbitrary commit object name, in whch case it checks
out and detaches HEAD.
A tricky part is that an exact branch name is often a perfectly
valid commit object name, so rule (1) trumps the rule (2). You
just discovered a way to have a detached HEAD at a commit that
happens to be at an existing branch -- by naming that commit
without using its exact branch name.
An easier way to spell that would be:
$ git checkout master^0
but
master^0
heads/master
refs/heads/master
are all perfectly good ways to talk about the commit at the tip
of the 'master' branch without spelling it as an exact
branch name (which is 'master').
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