On Tue, Jul 04, 2017 at 12:00:49AM +0200, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> I don't have a OSX box, but was helping a co-worker over Jabber the > other day, and he pasted something like: > > $ git merge-base github/master head > > Which didn't work for me, and I thought he had a local "head" branch > until realizing that of course we were just resolving HEAD on the FS. > > Has this come up before? I think it makes sense to warn/error about > these magic /HEAD/ revisions if they're not upper-case. > > This is likely unintentional and purely some emergent effect of how it's > implemented, and leads to unportable git invocations. JFTR this is one common case of confusion on Windows as well. To the point that I saw people purposedly using "head" on StackOverflow questions. That is, they appear to think (for some reason) that branches in Git have case-insensitive names and prefer to spell "head" since it (supposedly) easier to type. I don't know what to do about it. Ideally we'd just have a way to perform a final check on the file into which a ref name was resolved to see its "real" name but I don't know whether all popular filesystems are case preserving (HFS+ and NTFS are, IIRC) and even if they are, whether the appropriate platform-specific APIs exists to perform such a check.
