Re: [RFC PATCH 0/4] Add alias option to git branch

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Kenneth Cochran <kenneth.cochran101@gmail.com> writes:

> From c1bad54b29ae1c1d8548d248f6ecaa5959e55f7b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Kenneth Cochran <kenneth.cochran101@gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2019 09:40:22 -0600
> Subject: [RFC PATCH 0/4] Add alias option to git branch
> Cc: Sahil Dua <sahildua2305@gmail.com>,
>     Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>,
>     Jeff King <peff@peff.net>

Avoid using these in-body headers.

Reader's MUA won't show this "Subject:", but instead show the same
"Add alias option to gir branch", among hundreds of mailing list
messages, making it very tempting to ignore these four messages.


> I find myself often using git symbolic-ref to get around work requirements to use branch names that are not very human friendly.
> There are a few problems with this:
> 	- There’s a lot of text to type
> 	- Mistyping certain parts (heads/refs) will do things other than create a branch alias
> 	- It will happily overwrite an existing branch
> 	- Deleting one that is checked out will put HEAD in an invalid state.

Meh.

All of the above are problems _you_ create by trying to use symbolic
refs.  If the project wants to use an overlong branch name, using it
with "git branch" or "git checkout" or whatever would be a much
better solution.  Command-line completion will complete long branch
names, and "git branch overly-long-name-of-an-existing-branch" will
not overwrite an existing branch (without --force).  "git branch -d
overly-long-name-of-an-existing-branch" would not delete an
checked-out branch, either.