Developer Discovers Git Recovery Script Failed Silently When HEAD Lagged Behind Main
A developer running a scheduled MCP server repo noticed their Git detached-HEAD recovery script, scripts/sync-main.sh, only handled the case where HEAD was ahead of the main branch. The script used a merge-base ancestry check that correctly fast-forwarded main when detached commits were newer, but mistakenly treated the reverse scenario — HEAD behind main — as an error requiring manual review. In practice, a HEAD behind main is a harmless state since all its commits are already contained in main, requiring only a simple checkout rather than a fast-forward merge. The gap went unnoticed for weeks because real sessions consistently produced the ahead-of-main case, masking the untested branch entirely. The developer reproduced the behind-main scenario in a scratch repository to verify the logic gap before patching the script, rather than relying on a code re-read alone.
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