Unexpected local changes immediately after fresh clone

Hi all,

As part of learning a bit more about git workflows, I thought I'd poke around a large and high-traffic repo, so I cloned Linus' linux-2.6 repository today from

git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git

After the clone was done, I changed into the repo's directory and ran a 'git status' (just out of habit), and it showed a bunch of uncommitted, unstaged changes.

Here's a log of the terminal during this (I removed no-ops like 'ls', and I inserted line breaks before each prompt for readability):

http://gist.github.com/63027

Doing a 'git diff' on the net/ subdirectory showed that the changes were sensible - i.e. it wasn't random corruption or anything. The ones I looked through were cleanups to part of the TCP code (you can see them in the gist linked above).

Is this normal or expected? My understanding was that a clone first received the current HEAD and its history, and then checked out the current state of it as the working copy. In any case, I would have expected the repositories at git.kernel.org to be bare and as such have no working copy for uncommitted changes to be in.

My system is a Mac OS X 10.5.6 box (aluminium MacBook); some details are below.

This may well be normal behaviour, but I asked about it in freenode:#git and no one had heard of it happening before.

Cheers Ben Hoskings

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$ uname -a Darwin hat 9.6.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.6.0: Mon Nov 24 17:37:00 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.9.59~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

$ which git /usr/local/bin/git

$ git --version git version 1.6.1.2

$ df / Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/disk0s2 233Gi 213Gi 19Gi 92% /