Den, skrevJacob Carlborg &lt;doob@me.com&gt;:<br />&gt; Yeah, that&#39;s correct. But in this case I think he actually was referring to the latest commit. I&#39;m pretty sure I&#39;ve heard the latest commit in SVN be referred to as &quot;trunk&quot;.<br /><br />I&#39;m too curious for my own good, so I had to waste some time to investigate.<br /><br />It seems HEAD is a meta-reference, pointing to some other reference (such as some other branch or a specific commit). For a full repository, it&#39;s also the base of the current checkout. (Or really, the index, for anyone else in my currently nit-picking mood).<br /><br />For a bare repository (I.E. without a working-copy such as you would find on GitHub), it seems to be whatever HEAD was in the repository that was initially cloned to create the bare repository.<br /><br />So, in the case assumed here, HEAD is the same thing as master, but it can really be anything (including the initial zero-commit). So &quot;master&quot;, is always the last commit in the &quot;master&quot; branch, while HEAD can be anything.<br /><br />I think &quot;master&quot; is always a better translation of &quot;trunk&quot;. :)