git pull fails with http urls?

I've noticed a problem with pulling http urls. I can clone them fine:

  git clone http://www.gnome.org/~alexl/git/gio.git/

and I can pull with:

  git pull

which works as expected however if I try:

  git pull http://www.gnome.org/~alexl/git/gio.git/

it fails with:

  error: pick-rref: HEAD not found
  No such ref HEAD at http://www.gnome.org/~alexl/git/gio.git/

The HEAD file is there at http://www.gnome.org/~alexl/git/gio.git/HEAD and:

  git pull http://www.gnome.org/~alexl/git/gio.git/ master

works. It seems git just doesn't want to see/understand the HEAD file?

Is the above supposed to work or is something wrong with the above commands? I see this with git 1.5.2.3 and 1.5.3, google suggests this might have worked with 1.4.x and broke in 1.5...

Regards,

Richard

Pasky seems to have a locally modified version at repo.or.cz to add HEAD to the result of update-server-info, but as far as I can see, update-server-info never placed HEAD in the result, and I do not think ls-remote compensated it by adding HEAD by hand, so that change is fixing the symptom rather than fixing the regression, but I am not sure where the true regression is. Most likely we broke git-fetch while trying to deal with repositories with insanely large number of refs (aka "fetch--tool partial rewrite in C").

Having said all that, I think it is a good idea nevertheless to add HEAD information across all transports, like Pasky's patch does. Currently http/ftp/rsync do not report HEAD while git native protocols do.

Pasky, care to submit "server-info: Add HEAD to info/refs" for inclusion?