On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 1:39 PM Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 11:33:53AM -0700, Chris Torek wrote: > > > On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 10:19 AM Craig H Maynard <chmaynard@xxxxxx> wrote: > > > Does the git init command really need to create a default branch? Perhaps that step could be left to the user. > > > > The HEAD pseudo-ref must exist and must contain a valid OID or > > branch name. (If it does not exist, Git says that the directory > > is not a repository. Perhaps this test could be weakened, but > > that's definitely a fairly big change.) > > > > In a new, empty repository there are no valid OIDs, so HEAD must > > contain a branch name. The branch itself need not exist, but > > whatever name is in HEAD is the branch that will be created > > when the user makes the first commit. > > We definitely _could_ extend HEAD to allow a "not pointing at anything" > state. Presumably for reading that would behave like the "pointing at a > branch that doesn't exist yet" case. But I think the experience it > creates for writing is not very good. I.e., I think the best we could do > is something like: > > $ git init > $ git add some-files > $ git commit -m whatever > fatal: HEAD does not point to any branch > hint: use "git checkout -b <branch>" to make commits on <branch> > > Perhaps that's not _too_ bad, but it feels a bit unfriendly (and > definitely more likely to cause backwards compatibility issues than > picking _some_ default name). There would also be a lot of corner cases > to cover and debug (e.g., "git checkout foo" moving away from the "no > branch" state should make the usual complaints if we'd have to overwrite > or modify index and untracked files). > > -Peff The error doesn't need to come that late; it could come at the "init" step when no branch name is specified. If that's desirable, a necessary first step towards that would be making a plain "git init" throw a warning that we are creating a repo with a default branch name of <whatever> since the user didn't specify one. Of course, we could decide to only take that first step and never escalate it to an error. It'd still leave us with some default name, but would de-emphasize it some. Not sure if I'm in favor of either of these ideas or not, but just thought I'd point out alternate possibilities towards removing/de-emphasizing the default initial branch name. Elijah
