Re: git branch -M" regression in 1.7.7?

[Conrad Irwin <conrad.irwin@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 6:30 PM, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:
> A reproduction recipe (preferrably in the form of a patch to
> t/t3200-branch.sh would be welcome.

Sent in a separate email. Feel free to add a "Tested-by:" header to
your patch if you want :).

>
> -- >8 --
> Subject: treat "git branch -M master master" as a no-op again
>
> Before v1.7.7-rc2~1^2~2 (Prevent force-updating of the current branch,
> 2011-08-20), commands like "git branch -M topic master" could be used
> even when "master" was the current branch, with the somewhat
> counterintuitive result that HEAD would point to some place new while
> the index and worktree kept the content of the old commit.  This is
> not a very sensible operation and the result is what almost nobody
> would expect, so erroring out in this case was a good change.
>
> However, there is one exception to the "it's usually not obvious what
> it would mean to overwrite the current branch by another one" rule.
> Namely:
>
>        git branch -M master master
>
> is clearly meant to be a no-op, even if you are on the master branch.

Agreed. I thought after reading your patch about making it just do:

    if (!strcmp(oldname, newname))
        exit(0);

but I guess it would then not mark an entry in the reflog that people
could be relying on...

> +       clobber_head_ok = !strcmp(oldname, newname);
> +
> +       validate_new_branchname(newname, &newref, force, clobber_head_ok);

This looks ok, and will be improvable if the NEEDSWORK in branch.h is done.

The other thing I wonder is whether "git checkout -B master HEAD" or
"git branch -f master master" should have the same short-cut?

Conrad