Re: [Discuss] soften warning message after cloning "void"

From: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
Date: Feb 19, 2015, 00:47 UTC
Message-ID: <CAGZ79kb+qnhG22rKu9yMoBJKbiapf1kLfAnsfZW87eUpYezuRA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAPc5daUzdiS0HkVbqZvQvSm_49FhQj++hicmDTb717Cd7hg8hA@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 4:25 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 20 quoted lines

> On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 4:13 PM, Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com> wrote:
>>> +               warning(_("remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref; "
>>> +                         "leaving the current branch unborn.\n"));
>>
>> Personally I find that more confusing, because I have an idea of
>> what checkout may refer to. The notion of an unborn branch is not
>> clear to me.
>> Maybe
>>
>>> -               warning(_("remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref, "
>>> -                         "unable to checkout.\n"));
>>> +               warning(_("remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref; "
>>> +                         "Checking out $branch instead.\n"));
>>
>> with $branch being master in the example above. I'd have no idea
>> how to come up with a good heuristic which branch to checkout.
>> (It would need to match current behavior)
>
> Checking out a random branch is absolutely the worst thing you can
> do.

I agree on that, but why did I see the master branch checked out? (There was just one branch, so it's obvious which to checkout instead) But HEAD being broken, I would have expected

$ git clone ... remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref, checking out nothing $ git status HEAD detached at (nothing)

> Personally, I would think that the best thing you can do is to
> educate your users not to clone from a void.

I disagree on that. The repository may be broken by tinkering (why would you run git -C void symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/nosuch anywazy?) and people want to clone it nevertheless.

> Create some history
> that is worth sharing, and then push into an empty repository.

I am not sure what you mean here.