Re: Editing the root commit

Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] writes:

[detached unborn HEAD]

No thanks.  It will be too big a change to the fundamental invariant
for what a git directory is (and isn't).  It is simply unacceptable
to suddenly start treating a random directory that does not even
have HEAD as a git directory.

No problem. I imagine you wouldn't be keen on other representations of the
same state either, e.g. a null sha1 in HEAD, and would prefer to disallow
it altogether?

In that case, would you like me to do a test and a fix for the '(null)'
branch behaviour of

  git checkout --orphan dummy && git checkout --detach

? I assume that can't be intentional: looks from the code like it was
intended to tell me I'm on an unborn branch and can't do that.

It would be a lot more palatable approach to teach "rebase -i" defer
its "detaching HEAD to the onto commit" step before starting to read
the insn sheet.  Would such a change be too involved for it to be
worth supporting "rebase --root -i"?

I'm not sure as I don't really know the rebase shell scripts well at all,
but I'm happy to take a look and see. I imagine we wouldn't want to make
rebase -i much more complicated (and consequently harder to work on) just to
cover this rarely needed variant, but if it's relatively self-contained
(e.g. detect we're supposed to be making an orphan commit and do it by hand
instead of with git commit, maybe?) it would presumably be worthwhile?

Cheers,

Chris.