Re: [BUG REPORT] "git ls-remote http://git.domain.com/repo.git HEAD" doesn't work

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 14, 2008, 18:09 UTC
Message-ID: <7vlk17horn.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vprqkh423.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org> writes:
>
>> http://www.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/info/refs doesn't contain HEAD.
>> Shouldn't it ?
>
> Traditionally it _never_ talked about HEAD...

Well, to clarify:

 (1) I do not think it is unreasonable to change update-server-info to
     include HEAD in its output.  That would make ls-remote output over
     all protocols consistent;

 (2) However, the client-side tools that run ls-remote may have to
     interact with repositories that are managed with older git (including
     "Today's git").  If they rely on the presense of HEAD, they _are_
     buggy today (and have been so forever), and they _will stay_ buggy
     when they need to access such repositories.

So I do not mind (1) for its "consistency" value, but that would not be a "fix" for your problem.

Also we can do (1) only after somebody audits our own callers to make sure that they do not to get upset by presense of HEAD. They might have been assuming they'd get nothing outside refs/ when talking via http, and suddenly starting to emit HEAD might break them, in which case we cannot afford to do (1) --- that would break older clients.