From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 17:35:00 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/3] Unconfuse git clone when two branches at are HEAD.
Message-ID: <xmqqk3ir6wu3.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <531DBE1FF66D4356AEE6AEE5C2FE9389@PhilipOakley>

"Philip Oakley" <philipoakley@iee.org> writes:

> What I observed was that all the clones had the same HEAD problem,
> which I think comes from clone.c: guess_remote_head().

Yes.  They share "having to guess" property because their data
source does not tell them.

> My quick look at clone.c suggested to me that there would be a lot of
> commonality between the bundle data stream and the transport streams
> (identical?), and it was just a case of adding into the bundle data
> the same HEAD symref indication that would solve the normal clone
> problem (including backward compatibility). Is that a reasonable
> assesssment?

You need to find a hole in the existing readers to stick the new
information in a way that do not break existing readers but allow
updated readers to extract that information.  That is exactly what
we did when we added the protocol capability.  I do not offhand
think an equivalent hole exists in the bundle file format.