> they would not require a lecture to understand how to recover a commit made on a detached HEAD, a lecture that git provides. The only real difference here co

> they would not require a lecture to understand how to recover a commit made on a detached HEAD, a lecture that git provides. The only real difference here compared to Mercurial is that Mercurial doesn't issue a warning/lecture... In both cases you will have to know the changeset (or revision number in Mercurial) to get back to that anonomous branch (unless it's tip, but tip has its own issues). Git providing a warning for this is fair imho, as Git garbage collects anonomous branches. That, however, does not change the fact that checking out a random commit and a branch are the same thing in UI and implementation.