Re: Cloning empty repositories, was Re: What is the idea for bare repositories?

Brian Gernhardt [off-list ref] writes:

On Nov 13, 2007, at 5:50 AM, Matthieu Moy wrote:

quoted

While clone normally does a bit more:

[remote "origin"]
       url = /tmp/git1/.git
       fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
[branch "master"]
       remote = origin
       merge = refs/heads/master

But how is clone expected to do that when the origin is an empty
repo?  There is no branch for it to track, and automagically setting
it to master is bogus because then it's tracking something that
doesn't exist.

An implementation of that would probably need to special-case the
empty repository. But an empty repository is already a special case.
HEAD already points to master, and master is already hardcoded here:

$ cat .git/HEAD 
ref: refs/heads/master

So, it's possible for HEAD to point to a branch which doesn't exist
yet, it's possible to commit to a branch which doesn't exist yet. It
would make sense to extend that to allow a remote to point to a branch
which doesn't exist either.

But don't get me wrong: I probably won't implement that myself, so I
can't _ask_ people to do it for me. I would just appreciate if people
stopped calling me (and other users interested in a sane empty clone
behavior) idiot because I think it would make sense to do it.

-- 
Matthieu