I have a bare repository that’s used as the central store for my project. All the developers do git clone <repo> to share with it. When they do the clone, they get a checkout of the master branch (unless they do git clone -n) because repo.git/HEAD contains ref: refs/heads/master, making this the Active Branch.
The question is, how do I change the Active Branch properly? I could simply hack the repo.git/HEAD file directly, but that seems nasty and, well, hacky.
I tried doing git checkout <otherbranch> in the repo .git directory, but that failed because I wasn’t in a work tree.
I tried git update-ref HEAD refs/heads/otherbranch but that just updated refs/heads/master to be the same as refs/heads/otherbranch (okay, I did that one in a dummy repository, not my production one!)
I tried git update-ref --no-deref HEAD refs/heads/otherbranch and that almost worked. It updated the HEAD file, but it set it to the SHA1 of the commit pointed to by refs/heads/otherbranch.
I’m testing with git version 1.7.0.2.msysgit.0.
I’m guessing there’s no way to do this through git push, as allowing all and sundry to change your default branch seems a bit unsafe (!), but surely there’s a better way to do it in the repo .git directory than directly hacking the HEAD file.