Brian Gernhardt <benji@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> My final thought is that the rational ORIG_HEAD and when we set it is
> not clearly documented anywhere. But I am currently out of time to
> work on git, so that patch won't be coming from me soon.
The idea behind ORIG_HEAD is to have an anchoring point before an
operation that moves your HEAD in a drastic way. Think if it as a
poor-man's reflog -- in fact it predates reflog.
That is why reset saves away the HEAD before it does its thing, so that
you can easily say "Oops, I did not mean it -- reset ORIG_HEAD" to flip
back to the previous state. Both a fast-forward merge and a real merge
can be undone by resetting back to ORIG_HEAD.
So in that sense:
(1) ORIG_HEAD is not strictly necessary these days, because we have
reflogs;
(2) Even then, it is handy and useful, and we could add ORIG_HEAD to more
commands such as "git am" and "git rebase".
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