Operations on unborn branch

[Martin von Zweigbergk <martinvonz@gmail.com>]

While looking at how to handle "git rebase --root", I noticed that
"git cherry-pick" fails with the following when run on an unborn
branch:

error: You do not have a valid HEAD
fatal: cherry-pick failed

I can not see any reason that it shouldn't work. "git cherry-pick -n"
does work. (For rebase, "git cherry-pick --ff" would be used, and I
think that should also work on an unborn branch.)

Also, "git reset" doesn't work on an unborn branch and I can not see
any reason that it shouldn't work. This was also asked on stack
overflow [1], and of course the solution is to use "git rm --cached",
but doesn't mean that "git reset" shouldn't work.

I have very limited time to work on git these days, so if anyone else
would like to work on any of this, I would be very happy. I _might_
take some time to fix the cherry-pick issue.

Btw, every time I run into problems like these with the treatment of
root commits, I can't help but wonder how things would look if git had
always had a single root commit (naturally with some dummy user,
timestamp etc to ensure sameness across repos). With my limited
knowledge, it seems like that would complicate a few things, but
simplify a lot of things (maybe I'm biased because of the things I
have happened to work on?). Has anyone spent some time seriously
thinking about this? I suppose it would be hard to introduce
backward-compatibly, and maybe this is very unrealistic even for git
2.0, but I would be curious to hear what others think.

Martin

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3894808/new-git-repository-and-already-git-reset-does-not-work