Hacker News Reader

Comment by kleinsch | Hacker News Reader

If you're in a detached head state and create a new commit, you have a commit that isn't on a branch. The commit still has a parent, so it's not the branch that's tracking the sequence, it's the commit. Branches are just pointers that get updated as you add commits.

View on HN

This feels like declaring squares aren't rectangles because you can make rectangles that aren't a square.

Git is only commits. Branches and tags are references to the commits; one moves while the other one doesn’t. That’s it.

Commits link to their parent(s) until the initial commit. You can visualize a “branch” as a series of commits, but the same thing can exist without calling it a branch:

    A -> B -> C —> Initial

Is that a branch? No. How about:

    /refs/heads/main = A

That’s a branch, and it looks exactly the same as a tag:

    /refs/tags/v1 = A

Neither a branch or a tag is “a series of commits” even if you think it does.

> You can visualize a “branch” as a series of commits, but the same thing can exist without calling it a branch

You can visualize a "square" as a rectangle with equal sides, but the same thing can exist without calling it a square.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com