Re: Inconsistent behavior of the path disambiguator

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 7:38 PM, Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

I do not think there is any bug.  You were being bitten by folks who tried
to be helpful for newbies by introducing a(n arguably confusing) special
case; I can see why this is confusing, though.

Thanks.

We just switched to Git, and our developers got used to being able to
just `git checkout branch` to create a local remote-tracking one for
that remote branch.

Then we were bitten by a branch `foo` when path `./foo` existed.

I think the syntactic sugar needs to either be removed, or
(preferably) be made consistent.

The current behavior is that if I try to checkout a branch that
doesn't exist, but does exist on the remote, git creates a local
remote tracking branch for the one I tried to check out.

It makes no sense IMHO for the disambiguating syntax to break that
behavior, especially since in some cases, the disambiguating syntax is
necessary.

Thanks, D