Re: someone changed the contents of my HEAD.

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Feb 28, 2006, 05:22 UTC
Message-ID: <7vlkvwt5v9.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <20060228030446.GA23490@redhat.com>

Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> When checking in changes previously, I used this..
>
> #!/bin/sh
> export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="$1"
> export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="$2"
> tree=$(git-write-tree) || exit 1
> commit=$(git-commit-tree $tree -p HEAD) || exit 1
> echo $commit > .git/HEAD

This has been deprecated for a looong time, but perhaps I should have been louder. "git commit --author" should be fine -- I do not think you do not even need such a wrapper.

Show 6 quoted lines

> For my newly created repos, this isn't a problem, as I can fudge my
> commit-as script to write to .git/refs/heads/master instead, but
> my concern now is the unpulled changes in the existing repos
> I have on master.  Will Linus be able to pull those into his tree
> with git 1.2.3, or will I have to recreate those repos with the
> new-style .git/HEAD ?

A .git/HEAD symlink pointing at refs/heads/master _is_ still (and will be) supported, so either symlink or symref is fine. Bare SHA1 object name in HEAD is not -- git would not know which branch you are on, so "checkin" would not work after that.

Your refs/heads/master might be stale (one rev or more older than what you replaced .git/HEAD with) but still should be a proper ancestor. After making sure your refs/heads/master has the right commit (you may have it there already if you have been updating them using "git-push"), running "git-symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/master" would fix things.