On Fri, Oct 06, 2017 at 07:09:10PM +0200, Michael Haggerty wrote: > I do have one twinge of uneasiness at a deeper level, that I haven't had > time to check... > > Does this patch make it easier to *set* HEAD to an unborn branch that > d/f conflicts with an existing reference? If so, that might be a > slightly worse UI for users. I'd rather learn about such a problem when > setting HEAD (when I am thinking about the new branch name and am in the > frame of mind to solve the problem) rather than later, when I try to > commit to the new branch. Good question. The answer is no, it's allowed both before and after my patch. At least via git-symbolic-ref. I agree it would be nice to know earlier for such a case. For symbolic-ref, we probably should allow it, because it's plumbing that may be used for tricky things. For things like "checkout -b", you'd generally get a timely warning as we try to create the ref. The odd man out is "checkout --orphan", which leaves the branch unborn. It might be nice if it did a manual check that the ref is available (and also that it's syntactically acceptable, though I think we may do that already). But all of that is orthogonal to this fix, I think. -Peff
