Re: git-am with an initial checkin doesn't work

> Dirk Süsserott <newsletter@dirk.my1.cc> writes:
> 
>> # Try to "import" the patch:
>> git am 0001-initial-checkin.patch
>>
>> The latter yields to
>> fatal: HEAD: not a valid SHA1
>> fatal: bad revision 'HEAD'
>>
>> It works, when I
>> git apply 0001-initial-checkin.patch
>> instead of am'ing it, but then the thing isn't committed and I've to
>> manually git-commit it.
>>
>> Is this a bug, intentional behavior, or am I missing some magic option
>> to git-am?
> 
> The original mode of operation of the e-mail patchflow commands was to
> support project members who contribute changes to _existing_ projects, and
> maintainers to accept such changes.  The reason behind the behaviour you
> are observing is merely a historical accident that nobody bothered about
> use cases outside of that original purpose.  For exactly the same reason,
> the original implementation of format-patch did not bother with the root
> commit.
> 
> IOW, this was not an intentional behaviour, neither it was a bug.  It was
> simply use outside of spec, and nobody bothered until f79d4c8 (git-am:
> teach git-am to apply a patch to an unborn branch, 2009-04-10), which is
> v1.6.3-rc1~11^2, added a support for it.
> 
> What version of git are you running?
> 
>