Subject: Re: Git clone - head not pointing to master

From: Konstantin Khomoutov <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 16:40:58 +0400

On Fri, 30 Dec 2011 16:52:57 +0530
Vibin Nair <[email-masked]> wrote:

>   I am a Git beginner. Recently i started working on a codebase (that
> is checked in to a git repository) of our client, who is not very
> aware about how git works.
> The repository has multiple branches such as
> 
> origin/user1
> origin/master
> origin/user2
> 
> Now when i take a clone of this repository : git clone <repo-url>, a 
> clone of the repo is created on my machine.
> 
> But when i do a : "git branch" it shows
> 
> user1 *
> 
> which means that the "head" is pointing to the "user1" branch.
> 
> The client told me that all the recent code were being merged into
> the "master" branch and hence the "user1" branch has code which is
> older than "master" branch.
> 
> I had 2 queries :
> 
> 1. Is it possible to make the "head" of the remote point to "master" 
> instead of "user1", so that other members of my team get the latest
> code when they try to clone the repository.
`git clone` checks out the branch which the HEAD ref in the remote repo
points to.  You can use `git symbolic-ref` to retarget HEAD if it's a
bare repository.  If the repository is non-bare HEAD tracks what's
checked out, so it can be changed by doing `git checkout`.
Note that you can pass the "-b <branch>" command-line option to `git
clone` to make it create a local tracking branch and check it out for
an arbitrary remote branch <branch>.

> 2. Is there any way to safely merge "user1" to "master".
This question has little sense because it heavily depends on what you
mean by "safely".  The correct way to state a question like this is to
think whether merging user1 to master has sense from the project's
development standpoint.