Re: Unable to clone empty repositories remotely

From: Hannu Koivisto <azure@iki.fi>
Date: Nov 26, 2008, 13:13 UTC
Message-ID: <834p1ur5p2.fsf@kalahari.s2.org>
In-Reply-To: <46d6db660811251333u583468e0ma2846796ca9df68d@mail.gmail.com>

"Christian MICHON" <christian.michon@gmail.com> writes:

Show 38 quoted lines

> On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 10:05 PM, Hannu Koivisto <azure@iki.fi> wrote:
>> Greetings,
>>
>> mkdir test
>> cd test
>> git init --bare --shared=group
>> cd ..
>> git clone test test2
>>
>> works, though clone says it cannot checkout, which is expected.
>> This is nevertheless very useful when you create a shared
>> repository for a new project; you can then create a personal clone
>> and start adding stuff to it.  If, however, you normally work on
>> another machine and want to have your personal clone there
>> (i.e. git clone ssh://therepomachine/somewhere/test), cloning
>> doesn't work at all (tested with git 1.6.0.3.525.ge32c2 in Cygwin):
>>
>> Initialized empty Git repository in /cygdrive/c/temp/test/.git/
>> fatal: no matching remote head
>>
>> This behaviour isn't documented by either git-init(1) or
>> git-clone(1).  I think it would be very convenient if this worked
>> for the reasons mentioned above.  I'm sure you could create your
>> personal repository with git init and then git remote add the
>> shared repository to it but that's much more difficult.
>>
>> --
>> Hannu
>>
>> --
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>
> how about creating at least 1 empty commit before any cloning ?
>
> wouldn't this solve the problem ?

No, it wouldn't. I don't doubt that there are workarounds - I mentioned one possibility myself. Admittedly your workaround may be more convenient than mine, but it's still a workaround.

Now that I think of it, I wonder if one could go one step further in shared repository creation usability and make it possible to do that git init step remotely as well (I mean, directly with a one-step git command instead of ssh host "cd /repos ; mkdir foo ; cd foo; git init ..."). Since git init doesn't take non-option arguments, I suppose it could be extended to accept ssh (and file) urls for this purpose? And maybe an option to create a corresponding local clone at the same time.

-- 
Hannu