"Actually Using Git": can't branch on an empty repo

Open Beginner friendly
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Assessment

Difficulty
1/5
Estimated time
Under an hour
Newbie friendliness
65/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
git
Domain
documentation

Research direction

Open tutorials/actually-using-git/lessons/conflicting-branches.md and review the instructions for participants who choose git init. Clarify that they should create, add, and commit a dummy readme.md before creating a branch. Done means the git init path no longer leads to the reported error.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

On tutorials/actually-using-git/lessons/conflicting-branches.md , there are three reasonable ways to initialize a repo:

  1. Reuse an existing repo
  2. Create a new repo on Github and then clone it
  3. Use git init

If a participant uses the third option (git init) and then, following the directions, immediately tries to create a new branch, they'll get an error:

fatal: Not a valid object name: 'master'.

Instead, they should create a dummy readme.md, add and commit it, and then proceed.

The instructions should be clarified for folks who choose the third option.

Dominant language
CSS
Stars
6
Forks
2
No merged PRs in 30d

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First steps

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  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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