git clone - not getting the correct default branch

Luke Diamand· Apr 18, 2012, 13:05 UTC · lore

A bit weird this.

I have a bare repo (managed with gitolite) which, when I clone it, always comes up with origin/HEAD pointed to origin/master.

This despite the fact that on the repo, HEAD is a symbolic ref to origin/dev.

i.e.

% git clone git@myserver:myrepo
...
% git branch
* master

% ssh myserver % cd /path/to/myrepo.git % cat HEAD ref: refs/heads/dev

What could be going wrong? Other repos don't have this problem.

Both machines are using 1.7.9.4.

Thanks, Luke

Tomas Carnecky· Apr 18, 2012, 13:53 UTC · re: Luke Diamand · lore

Re: git clone - not getting the correct default branch

On Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:05:14 +0100, Luke Diamand <luke@diamand.org> wrote:

Show 20 quoted lines

> A bit weird this.
> 
> I have a bare repo (managed with gitolite) which, when I clone it,
> always comes up with origin/HEAD pointed to origin/master.
> 
> This despite the fact that on the repo, HEAD is a symbolic ref to origin/dev.
> 
> i.e.
> 
> % git clone git@myserver:myrepo
> ...
> % git branch
> * master
> 
> % ssh myserver
> % cd /path/to/myrepo.git
> % cat HEAD
> ref: refs/heads/dev
> 
> What could be going wrong? Other repos don't have this problem.

Does master and dev in the repo on the server point to the same commit? Because the git protocol does not expose which *branch* HEAD points to, only which *commit*. So if two branches point to the same commit, git just takes the first branch and points the local HEAD to that.

tom