Re: Question: git clone --no-checkout behavior

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 12, 2012, 17:40 UTC
Message-ID: <7vliioc1yn.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <CAGyf7-EZOSiATo3yF5x+FT6_QAkMTJ+AmrE27kwmxLkLXdaJKg@mail.gmail.com>

Bryan Turner <bturner@atlassian.com> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> I've witnessed the following behavior in both git 1.7.6 and 1.7.10.4.
>
> Assume I have a bare clone, some-repo.git. If I run:
> - git clone --shared --no-checkout /path/to/some-repo.git shared-repo
> - cd shared-repo
> - git status

I do not recall we *designed* it in such a way that you would commit an empty tree if you run "git commit" immediately after making such a clone. But I do not think it is a bug, either.

I think the most likely reason nobody even noticed this is because the expected use scenario for --no-checkout is when user does not know (and does not care to find out) what branch is checked out (if nonbare) or marked as the primary (if bare) in the repository she is cloning from, and will checkout the branch she wants to work on immediately after cloning, i.e.

	git clone -n $over_there here
        cd here
	# she knows she wants to fork from 'nitfol'
        git checkout -t -b frotz origin/nitfol

Not having anything in the $GIT_DIR/index (which is why you see "everything is removed from the index, you will commit an empty tree" in the status output) does not matter in this scenario, because the first command she invokes will be "git checkout".

If you populated $GIT_DIR/index from the tree of HEAD, you would see everything is deleted in the working tree. You can simulate it by doing this:

	git clone -n $over_there here
        cd here
	git read-tree HEAD
	git status

But it would not help people who want to check another branch out immediately after cloning with -n, which is the whole point of the option, so...