Re: Why is git clone not checking out files?

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Jan 30, 2007, 19:04 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0701301058250.3611@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <200701301950.00195.jnareb@gmail.com>

On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Jakub Narebski wrote:

> 
> ...so "git clone" tries to checkout HEAD -> refs/heads/master
> branch, which does not exist. It is strange that git does not
> report error or at least warning, though...

Well, HEAD pointing to a non-existent branch is actually a perfectly valid thing. It literally means "I haven't done the first commit yet".

So Bill's repository is a perfectly fine repository. It has a topic branch (called 'topic'), and it has an empty 'master' branch that just hasn't seen any commits yet. You can work on it as a full and normal git repository, because it really *is* a full and normal git repository.

Of course, I do agree that it'sa fairly confusing way to set up a repo, and you generally shouldn't do it, but Bill did it that way explicitly. Maybe he didn't do it "on purpose", but git at no point in time had any way to know that Bill wanted somethign else. Nothing he did was "wrong", and it's quite possible that it's what he could have meant to do.

Anyway, it's certainly easy to fix. Bill, you can either:

 - just rename the "topic" branch to "master"

 - change the HEAD to point to "topic" rather than "master".

(and if you do that setup in the future, the way to populate the initial bare repository would have been to just do

	git fetch original topic:master

and you'd never have seen this, because the branch you fetched would have been named the default 'master' in the first place).

		Linus