On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 12:56:22PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

I think:

  git checkout --guess origin

would make sense to dereference origin/HEAD to "foo", as if we had said
"git checkout foo". That's the explicit part that seems safe. My
question is whether:

  git checkout origin

should likewise do so.

I see.  I think "--guess" is by default true, so unless you have
checkout.guess=false configured, my answer to the above question is
yes.

Yes, I agree with the current definition of "--guess", the two would be
the same. I'm just concerned that people will be unhappy with changing
the behavior of the latter, so everything else (the "tri-state --guess"
thing) is an attempt to band-aid over that.

If we decide it's not a concern worth addressing, then I agree the two
should behave the same. I'm just not convinced it won't annoy people who
are used to how "git checkout" works now with non-local branches.

-Peff