On Mon, Jun 5, 2017 at 4:10 PM, brian m. carlson <sandals@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 05, 2017 at 07:34:12PM +0530, Kaartic Sivaraam wrote: >> Hello all, >> >> I noticed a weird output by git when trying to run 'git status' on a >> newly initialized git repository. It prints the following, >> >> > On branch master >> > >> > Initial commit >> > >> > nothing to commit (create/copy files and use "git add" to track) >> >> >> What's that "Initial commit" supposed to mean? > > It just means that it will be the first commit in the repository. It's > a helpful reminder that some operations (such as git log) won't work as > expected. In addition, many people want to commit certain files (such > as .gitignore) in their initial commit, and this may jog their memory. Tangent: For any personal project (or git repository that I start) I find myself doing one of the following: 1) I think about implications of the git history. And from what I understand there are a couple of issues with the very first commit (e.g. interactive rebase needs special flags to start from the 0-th commit) In this case I run git commit --allow-empty -m "initial commit" first and then proceed doing whatever 2. I do not think about history, so the first commit is a git commit -a -m "I made a shiny thing", ignoring any advice git gave me... On the subject: maybe we want to rename initial commit to root commit? (evil-me also thinks we could name it "parent-less commit", to reinforce what the lovely git man page generator tries to point at.)