From: Wesley J. Landaker <wjl@icecavern.net>
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2011 19:21:00 GMT
Subject: Re: Creating remote branch called HEAD corrupts remote clones
Message-ID: <201101201221.00977.wjl@icecavern.net>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTikvVaSTV8hVjDXLvOEEDv5qr19ybk3Cm--+bgWA@mail.gmail.com>

On Thursday, January 20, 2011 10:32:40 Felipe Contreras wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 1:14 PM, Stephen Kelly <steveire@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Stephen Kelly wrote:
> >> On Friday we had an issue where a developer pushed a branch called
> >> HEAD to the remote server. The result was that other developers could
> >> not pull or push.
[...]
>  Which version of git?
>  Which kind of network transport was used?
>  Is this reproducible?

FWIW, here is a quick demonstration of at least one problem with having a 
branch called HEAD. You can make it and push it fine, but when cloning, you
don't get it.

#!/bin/bash
git init --bare origin.git
git clone origin.git wc1
cd wc1
git commit --allow-empty -m "Initial rev"
git checkout -b HEAD
git commit --allow-empty -m "Make HEAD branch"
git push --all
cd ..
git clone origin.git wc2
diff -u <(cd wc1; git branch -a) <(cd wc2; git branch -a)
diff -u <(cd wc1; git log --all) <(cd wc2; git log --all)

If I do the following from wc2 I can get the branch manually:

git pull origin refs/heads/HEAD:HEAD

I haven't played with it enough to see what other problems might arise.