On Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 2:36 PM Eckhard Maaß <eckhard.s.maass@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, Mar 08, 2019 at 04:57:48PM +0700, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy wrote: > > Similar to automatic detach, this behavior could be confusing because > > it can sometimes create a new branch without a user asking it to, > > especially when the user is still not aware about this feature. > > > > In the future, perhaps we could have a config key to disable these > > safety nets and let 'switch' do automatic detach or dwim > > again. But that will be opt-in after the user knows what is what. For > > now give a short option if you want to use it often. > > As I am late to the patch series (sorry!), has there been already any > discussion on that? In my experience, people get confused with detached > HEAD state quite often, whereas the automatic creation of a local branch > is no problem. This statement does a good job of articulating my (unspoken) response to this patch. Whereas a detached HEAD might be scary and confusing to newcomers, and difficult for them to recover from, automatic creation of a DWIM'd local branch doesn't seem so problematic (if at all). With git-checkout, it's very easy to accidentally get into a detached HEAD state, so it makes some sense to protect newcomers, by default, from that accident in git-switch. However, auto-creation of a new local branch is not, for a couple reasons, nearly so weighty a matter. First, in many cases it may be less likely to happen since it requires presence of a corresponding remote tracking branch. Second, it's intuitively easy to recover from it: when git-switch reports that it created a new branch, though perhaps surprising, the user would naturally know to look for a command to "delete a branch". And, unlike a detached HEAD, which newcomers may mistakenly believe lead to irretrievable loss of work, an unexpected branch creation carries no such penalty, perceived or real. > So if it is deemed to be too confusing to dwim in this > case, could we add a hint suggesting the command? Something like: > "No suitable branch <foo> found, however there is a remote tracking > branch <origin/foo> that you can siwtch and create with `git switch > --guess foo`" (or maybe the one without guess)? That could be helpful if git-switch continues to make --no-guess the default, but making --guess the default (as it is in git-checkout) would likely be even better (for the reasons enumerated above).
