Seemingly inconsistent checkout behaviour

[Bart Kuster <bart.kuster@sidn.nl>]

Dear People of Git,

I had some trouble getting out of a detached HEAD state using git checkout. I’ve solved it now but the behaviour of checkout when doing so leaves me a bit puzzled.

I’d expect the behaviour of the commands below to be equivalent:

   git checkout origin/main

vs

   git config checkout.defaultRemote origin
   git checkout main

But they are not; the former leaves the HEAD detached while the latter sets it to main. I failed to find an explanation in the git-checkout documentation, which seems to indicate that checkout always updates HEAD.

Could someone clarify what's going on?

A bit more elaborate transcript of what I did is below.

Thanks in advance!

Kind regards,
Bart Kuster

---

# Checkout a commit to get into detached HEAD state
$ git checkout aac02b81d735d5f15b3b3c61a84ccb79a8a90145
HEAD is now at aac02b8 Merge branch 'main' of https://repo into main
$ git checkout origin/main
HEAD is now at aac02b8 Merge branch 'main' of https://repo into main
$ git status
HEAD detached at aac02b8
(...)
$ git config checkout.defaultRemote origin
$ git checkout main
On branch main
(...)
$ git status
On branch main
$