In git, is there a simple way of introducing an unrelated branch to a repository?

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There is a new feature (since V1.7.2) which makes this task a little more high-level than what’s in any of the other answers.

git checkout now supports the --orphan option. From the man page:

git checkout [-q] [-f] [-m] --orphan <new_branch> [<start_point>]

Create a new orphan branch, named
<new_branch>, started from
<start_point> and switch to it. The
first commit made on this new branch
will have no parents and it will be
the root of a new history totally
disconnected from all the other
branches and commits.

This doesn’t do exactly what the asker wanted, because it populates the index and the working tree from <start_point> (since this is, after all, a checkout command). The only other action necessary is to remove any unwanted items from the working tree and index. Unfortunately, git reset --hard doesn’t work, but git rm -rf . can be used instead (I believe this is equivalent to rm .git/index; git clean -fdx given in other answers).

In summary:

git checkout --orphan newbranch
git rm -rf .
<do work>
git add your files
git commit -m 'Initial commit'

I left <start_point> unspecified because it defaults to HEAD, and we don’t really care anyway. This sequence does essentially the same thing as the command sequence in Artem’s answer, just without resorting to scary plumbing commands.

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