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

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 14, 2009, 18:24 UTC
Message-ID: <7vocrngm2d.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <4A5C9C66.1050100@dirk.my1.cc>

Dirk Süsserott <newsletter@dirk.my1.cc> writes:

Show 14 quoted lines

> # 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?