Remote's 'currently active branch' not HEAD?

Hi everyone,

I have a strange behaviour from a bare repo I inherited; when I clone from that one (ssh) the branch checked out is *not* the one referenced in HEAD in the remote repo, but apparently some variation of the alphabetically first or temporally last, or the last *new* branch pushed.

Where would I look to find the reason for this behaviour? How does git transfer the 'current branch' info during the clone?

There is no 'master' branch in the original bare repo, but HEAD points to a valid value (refs/heads/r1).

Testing with another repo unfortunately doesn't show any consistency, more like heisenbuggish.

Andreas

On Tue, 03 Sep 2013 12:46:52 +0000, Andreas Krey wrote: ...

I now have a sample repo that reproduces this behaviour. Unpack tar file, clone, see clone having 'wrong' branch checked out, apparently independent of the transport:

  wget http://abox.h.apk.li/clot.tar
  tar xvf clot.tar
  (cd clot && git branch -a)  # Current branch is 'r1'
  git clone clot c1
  (cd c1 && git branch -a)    # Current branch is 'aa'?

Same with git v1.7.1.x and v1.8.4.

Andreas

On Tue, 03 Sep 2013 13:48:31 +0000, Andreas Krey wrote: ...

Ouch, it looks like 'git clone' doesn't actually know the 'current remote branch' but picks one of those that happen to have the HEAD *commit* as their tip.

At least the 'git clone' doc would be misleading then.

Andreas

On Tue, Sep 03, 2013 at 02:37:33PM +0200, Andreas Krey wrote:

Yes, it picks the first of those:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/168144

On Tue, 03 Sep 2013 15:02:50 +0000, Michael Schubert wrote: ...

Thanks for the pointer.

And pity, the patches didn't make it that time either...

Andreas

Andreas Krey <a.krey@gmx.de> writes:

And the key article in that discussion by Peff points to http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/102039 with "I had some complaints at the time, but re-reading it I don't see anything that would prevent us from revisiting the topic now." Reading the patch series from 2008 again, I do agree with J6t's comment that it should be just a regular capability, i.e. like what Peff suggests in his comment on [PATCH 5/6 (v2)], but other than that, I do not see anything that would prevent us from revisiting the topic now, either.

On Tue, 03 Sep 2013 08:33:39 +0000, Junio C Hamano wrote: ...

I've implemented it as a 'sym=refs/heads/foo' capability. It actually makes the patch series a lot shorter; the only thing I don't get running is the t5601-clone.sh test case.

If I run the exact same commands in a shell script they succeed, in t5601-clone.sh the clone step seems to fail, and I have no clue where to look for a clue.

Any pointers?

Andreas

On Fri, 06 Sep 2013 13:41:30 +0000, Andreas Krey wrote: ...

Oh, never mind. --verbose shows that the test is borked; it tries a checkout into an already-existing dir. Patch coming up soon.

Andreas