Re: Fatal error running status in new repo

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 16, 2010, 06:05 UTC
Message-ID: <20100216060528.GB2169@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20100216041945.GB10296@vfb-9.home>

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 08:19:45PM -0800, Jacob Helwig wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> I just noticed this when creating a new repo for a project.
> 
> $ mkdir tmp
> $ cd tmp
> $ git init
> Initialized empty shared Git repository in /home/jhe/projects/tmp/.git/
> $ git status
> # On branch master
> #
> # Initial commit
> #
> warning: ignoring dangling symref HEAD.
> fatal: bad revision 'HEAD'
> nothing to commit (create/copy files and use "git add" to track)
> $ echo $?
> 0
> $ git --version
> git version 1.7.0

I can't reproduce it here:

  $ mkdir tmp && cd tmp && git init && git status
  Initialized empty Git repository in /home/peff/tmp/.git/
  # On branch master
  #
  # Initial commit
  #
  nothing to commit (create/copy files and use "git add" to track)

Furthermore, the "ignoring dangling symref" message can only come from one place (sha1_name.c:285), and is specifically protected by a conditional making sure that the refname is not "HEAD". Which is just plain weird.

Do you have anything strange in your ~/.gitconfig? Can you try running with GIT_TRACE=1 to make sure we are not invoking some sub-command or something? Did you build git yourself? Can you double-check with a "make clean && make" that a newly built version exhibits the problem?

Show 7 quoted lines

> Seems a bit silly that "git status" should be issuing warnings, and
> fatal errors (especially when the exit code is still 0), when run before
> the first commit has been created in a brand new repository.
> 
> The warnings make sense if you know what's going on behind the scenes,
> but seem like the kind of thing that could scare someone new to git when
> they haven't actually done anything wrong at this point.

Agreed. These warnings absolutely should not be shown, but I don't really understand what is showing them.

-Peff