From: Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2015 00:43:32 GMT
Subject: Re: [Discuss] soften warning message after cloning "void"
Message-ID: <CAJo=hJt4qVd_dybSn9Wy2UPpvm1+Kg0pE=vyB_fr0eHqQEXdVg@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:
> Checking out a random branch is absolutely the worst thing you can
> do. Personally, I would think that the best thing you can do is to
> educate your users not to clone from a void. Create some history
> that is worth sharing, and then push into an empty repository.

Users are dumb.

Consider a website like GitHub where you create a repository on a a
remote server. It is initialized as an empty repo. They now want to
clone that empty repo to work with it:

  git clone https://example.com/foo
  cd foo
  .... hack hack
  git commit -a -m "Foo is awesome!"
  git push

This works from git-core servers because the ref advertisement tells
the client its an empty repo and its OK to checkout HEAD from nothing
and its all fine.

This fails from a JGit server because the ref advertisement for an
empty repository differs and disagrees with the format used by
git-core. The result is a confused client spewing an odd checkout
message.