Re: [Bug] cloning a repository with a default MASTER branch tries to check out the master branch

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: May 23, 2017, 12:12 UTC
Message-ID: <20170523121159.zxxp43o6es7lzcj3@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAJZjrdWXsuKrFzedLvyE-1mvD0RC5XYDkmvV3wRNWXjFAVt4iQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, May 23, 2017 at 04:01:06AM -0400, Samuel Lijin wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> For some reason the repo on GH does not have a HEAD pointer:
> 
> $ git ls-remote https://github.com/passcod/UPPERCASE-NPM.git
> efc7dbfd6ca155d5d19ce67eb98603896062f35a        refs/heads/MASTER
> e60ea8e6ec45ec45ff44ac8939cb4105b16477da        refs/pull/1/head
> f35a73dcb151d336dc3d30c9a2c7423ecdb7bd1c        refs/pull/2/head
> 0d9b3a1268ff39350e04a7183af0add912b686e6        refs/tags/V1.0.0
> efc7dbfd6ca155d5d19ce67eb98603896062f35a        refs/tags/V1.0.1
> 
> I'm not sure how you managed to do that, since GH rejects attempts to
> delete the current branch, but I believe if you set the default branch
> to MASTER it will work correctly.

The HEAD branch on the server side is still pointing at refs/heads/master. But since that doesn't exist, upload-pack doesn't advertise HEAD at all (it has no sha1).

You can recreate this situation with:

  cd /some/repo
  git init --bare dst.git
  git push dst.git HEAD:refs/heads/MASTER
  git ls-remote dst.git

No current-branch deletion required.

Félix should be able to re-point the server-side HEAD to MASTER via GitHub's web interface.

GitHub's post-receive hook usually does that automatically if you push a branch to a repository with an unborn HEAD. But I think there may be corner cases where it gets confused.

-Peff