If I understand correctly running the following should create an empty orphaned lib branch.
% git switch --orphan lib
Switched to a new branch 'lib'
And git seems to indicate that it has now switched to the lib branch.
However if I run:
% git branch
master
It seems to indicate that I'm on master still.
How do I know which branch I'm on?
Also if I try to switch to the lib branch, this is the message.
git checkout lib
error: pathspec 'lib' did not match any file(s) known to git
So it seems the lib branch was never created ...
Someone says it works in one of the answers, so I updated git to the latest version on MacOS.
git version 2.39.3 (Apple Git-145)
And I've repeated the entire experiment starting from scratch and these are all the steps.
% mkdir dir
% cd dir
% touch file
% cd ..
% git add *
% git commit -m "First Commit"
[main (root-commit) 3060034] First Commit
1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 dir/file
% git switch --orphan lib
Switched to a new branch 'lib'
% git branch
main
OK got it now. We have to actually do a commit on the new branch in order for git branch to show that we are on the branch...
So this is what I did.
% touch file
% git add * && git commit -m "Lib Commit"
[lib (root-commit) de7b684] Lib Commit
1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 dir/file
% git branch
* lib
main
Things work as intended. In particular, if you ask for the status
$ git status
On branch lib
No commits yet
nothing to commit (create/copy files and use "git add" to track)
you see that you are about to start with a clean slate, most importantly, there are no commits, yet.