Checking out a Git branch further back than the head
Famously, if you want to check out a repository at some arbitrary commit
back from the head of your current branch, you normally do this with
just 'git checkout <commit>
'. I do this periodically when making bug
reports in order to verify that one specific commit is definitely the
problem. Equally famously, this puts you into what Git calls a 'detached
HEAD' state, where Git doesn't know what branch you're on even if the
commit is part of a branch, or even part of 'main
'.
It's possible to move a branch (including 'main
') back to an older
commit while staying on the branch. This avoids Git complaints about
being in a detached HEAD state and makes 'git status
' do useful
things like report how many commits you are behind the upstream
tip. As far as I know so far, the way you do this is:
git checkout -B main <commit>
As 'git status
' will tell you, you can return to the tip from
this state by doing 'git pull
'. Equivalently, you can do 'git
merge --ff-only origin/main
', which avoids fetching anything new
from your upstream. This second option gives away the limitation
of this approach.
The limitation is that you can only do all of this if you don't have any
local commits that you rebase on top of the upstream. If you do have
local commits, I think that you want to live with being in the detached
HEAD state unless you like doing a bunch of work (and I'm assuming
here that you can live without your local changes; otherwise life gets
more complicated). Doing all of this back and forth movement of what
'main
' is smoothly relies on your normal main
being the same as
origin/main
, and that's not the case if you're rebasing local commits
on top of origin/main
every time you pull it.
(Git has a syntax for 'N commits back from HEAD' as part of selecting
revisions
(also), but for almost
everything I do what I care about is a specific commit I'm picking
out of 'git log
', not a number of commits back from the tip.)
It's a little bit annoying that you have to specify the branch name
in 'git checkout
' even though it's the current branch name. As
far as I know, Git has no special name you can use for 'the current
branch, whatever it's called', although it does have a variety of
ways of getting the name of the current branch. If you're scripting
this 'back up to a specific commit on a branch', you can use one
of those commands, but for use on the fly I'll just remember to
type 'main
' or 'master
' (depending on what the repository uses)
or whatever.
(This is one of the Git things that I don't want to have to work out twice. Although Git being Git, it may in time acquire a better way to do this.)
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