Re: Cloning empty repositories, was Re: What is the idea for bare repositories?

From: Matthieu Moy <matthieu.moy@imag.fr>
Date: Nov 13, 2007, 21:48 UTC
Message-ID: <vpqhcjp6clm.fsf@bauges.imag.fr>
In-Reply-To: <CBAEC42B-9F50-4723-9847-640D9832532E@silverinsanity.com>

Brian Gernhardt <benji@silverinsanity.com> writes:

Show 15 quoted lines

> On Nov 13, 2007, at 5:50 AM, Matthieu Moy wrote:
>
>> While clone normally does a bit more:
>>
>> [remote "origin"]
>>        url = /tmp/git1/.git
>>        fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
>> [branch "master"]
>>        remote = origin
>>        merge = refs/heads/master
>
> But how is clone expected to do that when the origin is an empty
> repo?  There is no branch for it to track, and automagically setting
> it to master is bogus because then it's tracking something that
> doesn't exist.

An implementation of that would probably need to special-case the empty repository. But an empty repository is already a special case. HEAD already points to master, and master is already hardcoded here:

$ cat .git/HEAD ref: refs/heads/master

So, it's possible for HEAD to point to a branch which doesn't exist yet, it's possible to commit to a branch which doesn't exist yet. It would make sense to extend that to allow a remote to point to a branch which doesn't exist either.

But don't get me wrong: I probably won't implement that myself, so I can't _ask_ people to do it for me. I would just appreciate if people stopped calling me (and other users interested in a sane empty clone behavior) idiot because I think it would make sense to do it.

-- 
Matthieu