Remote 'master' not updated, but works somehow

Having for a long time been thoroughly annoyed by our strict umasks, I decided to write a little program to deal with it, and naturally I put it in a git repo. After the initial commit (c0fa1db09bad112f7271378d907bf33d74c06f6b) I published it to my git space on our development server and cloned it out again (to get the nifty remotes things set up for free).

Then I noticed I had rushed it, as I usually do with hacks involving a total of less than 200 lines of code, so I had to make a couple of more commits to make it work.

After having pushed the fixes to the public site I went to have a look at it in gitweb, at https://devel.op5.se/~exon/git/

I was quite surprised to find that 'master' was still pointing to the root commit. After the usual culprits were excluded (permissions, bad paths, whatnot), I decided to try to clone the repo again to a different location.

Here's what happened:

devel!exon:~$ git clone softpub/mkpub.git/ mkpub
remote: Generating pack...
remote: Done counting 17 objects.
remote: Deltifying 17 objects.
remote:  100% (17/17) done
Indexing 17 objects.
remote: Total 17 (delta 3), reused 0 (delta 0)
  100% (17/17) done
Resolving 3 deltas.

devel!exon:~$ cat softpub/mkpub.git/refs/heads/master c0fa1db09bad112f7271378d907bf33d74c06f6b devel!exon:~$ cat mkpub/.git/refs/heads/master 5ba01a4709bcc8b482b207ba91d78ddb689a4091 devel!exon:~$ cd mkpub/ devel!exon:~/mkpub$ git push Everything up-to-date devel!exon:~/mkpub$ git rev-list master 5ba01a4709bcc8b482b207ba91d78ddb689a4091 e6a80831737517aa7ef29628429a18935b71de1d 8926e1519f69d95685ab5252886e7b237e21108e c0bfedaf572ee550af7927acb89a1a2e01c1ef2c c0fa1db09bad112f7271378d907bf33d74c06f6b devel!exon:~/mkpub$ GIT_DIR=../softpub/mkpub.git/ git rev-list master c0fa1db09bad112f7271378d907bf33d74c06f6b

(yes, the repo only has 4 commits)

And that's where I am now. Note that *cloning* from the repo actually works, although I can't for the life of me figure out why.

Any thoughts?