"sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph">
<p>In the past, <code>.git/HEAD</code> was a symbolic link pointing at
<code>refs/heads/master</code>.  When we wanted to switch to another branch,
we did <code>ln -sf refs/heads/newbranch .git/HEAD</code>, and when we wanted
to find out which branch we are on, we did <code>readlink .git/HEAD</code>.
But symbolic links are not entirely portable, so they are now
deprecated and symbolic refs (as described above) are used by
default.</p>
</div>
<div class="parag