How can I create a commit without a parent?

SLSIA. git commit-tree insists on having at least one parent commit at the command line. From reverse-engineering it seems like I could do it by setting .git/HEAD to 'ref: refs/heads/some-nonexistent-branch' but mucking with HEAD directly like that feels kinda scary.

Thanks, rg

Ron Garret <ron1@flownet.com> writes:

Incorrect. "git commit" might but "git commit-tree" does. Perhaps you are forgetting that the first object name is a tree to be wrapped.

A short answer is that you don't create a root commit twice in a single repository, period. Your repository _may_ be end up with more than one root but that typically is due to you fetching unrelated histories from different repositories, each created its own root.

In article <7vwryw6p16.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>,
 Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

No, I didn't forget that.  I forgot to omit the -p flag.  Doh!

Why not? I could easily create an empty root commit and multiple branches off that. (Maybe that's a better way to go.) What would be the difference?

rg

Ron Garret <ron1@flownet.com> writes:

You have git-symbolic-ref to set HEAD directly (don't forget to remove index).

Or you can set up / initialize separate (new) repository, create commit there and then pull this new repository into current one.

P.S. Creating new root (parentless) commit isn't something that you do on purpose, usually.

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 3:00 AM, Ron Garret <ron1@flownet.com> wrote:

I guess you're looking to do it with plumbing, but with porcelain the way I'd do it is:

$ git init foo $ git init bar $ cd bar $ git commit --allow-empty -m "empty bar root commit" $ cd ../foo $ git commit --allow-empty -m "empty foo root commit" $ git fetch ../bar master:bar

j.