TIL about git branch name conflicts with directories
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I am used to apply some structure to my branch names.
Except for main/master and my test branch, branches have a short lifecycle, because I delete them after being merged.
For this site I would create a branch post/title-of-the-article or at work I would include a ticket number, like so: feature/ISSUE-1337/Short-description-of-the-feature.
In both cases the first term reflects the kind of change or the reason for this branch to exist at all.
Common terms I use are post, feature, bugfix/fix, ti (technical improvement).
Some developers don’t like to use the / character and prefer to use a - instead, which is totally fine, but I do it the other way round.
The main difference is that a / structures the branches in directories, while a - puts all branches next to each other within the same directory.
I stumbled across this problem when I was testing something and created a test branch test/some-description.
The branch could not be created, because a branch named test already exists.
Try it for yourself. Executing the second command will lead to an error
git co -b testgit co -b test/some-descriptionfatal: cannot lock ref 'refs/heads/test/some-description': 'refs/heads/test' exists; cannot create 'refs/heads/test/some-description'