Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.email> writes: > An alternative in the other direction is to go with the 'not currently > on any branch' (detached at nowhere) but then require users to > deliberately create their first branch with their chosen name. This > moves the 'backward incompatibility' to a different place, which may be > easier to manage. As has already been mentioned by Peff, I do not think that is a workable alternative, especially given that people are generally afraid of and easily get confused by being on a detached HEAD. And there is no such thing as unborn detached HEAD. Existing versions of Git would not consider a $GIT_DIR that does not have any HEAD, which means a new repository created by such an "initially there is no branch" version of Git cannot be accessed by any existing versions of Git. It raises the backward incompatibility of such an approach to a whole new level that is simply unmanageable, I am afraid.
