Re: Find main branch

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jan 14, 2016, 21:04 UTC
Message-ID: <20160114210452.GA10825@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAPMsMoBNzmK618NPP-VXP_70hTxTsa13O9f_usiCPJ-SUOUz_g@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 06:40:15PM +0000, pedro rijo wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> Stefan Beller solution is based on the server, which may not be very
> easy to do when dealing with Github/Bitbucket/Gitlab and other God
> knows which provider.
> 
> Konstantin ls-remote solution is the one I'm already using, but if I
> have several branches on that commit, I will not be able to decide.

Right. Git used to guess, but that was not great exactly because of the ambiguity you have seen. Servers started publishing the value of the HEAD symref in git v1.8.4.3. I'd expect that to be available on any modern server.

There's unfortunately not a plumbing command to directly access the value, but "git remote set-head $remote -a" will query the remote and update refs/remotes/$remote/HEAD appropriately. As a bonus, if it's an older server that doesn't provide the HEAD value, it will fallback to the "old" heuristics (see guess_remote_head for details).

-Peff