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

Jakub Narebski [off-list ref] writes:

Sergei Organov wrote:

quoted

Just a wild idea. Doesn't it make sense to introduce perfect ultimate
common ancestor of the universe, probably calling it "the NULL commit"?
At first glance it seems that it can help to avoid corner cases
automagically.

No. Sometimes you want unrelated branches in repository ('html', 'man',
'todo' branches in git.git), sometimes multiple roots are natural (merging
in a project, like git-mailtools, gitweb, gitk, git-gui in git.git).

There's no contradiction IMHO. At least bzr and Mercurial have the
notion of "null revision" that is a kind of virtual ancestor of the
first revision of a project, and AFAICT, they supprot having unrelated
branches in the same repository, and merging originally unrelated
projects together (not sure for Mercurial, but bzr can do it).

It just depends on the definition of "starting a project". Either you
say you start the project with "init", in which case all projects
start with the same thing, or you say you start with the first
"commit" in which case every project start with something different.

Anyway, we can't modify existing git projects now (adding an ancestor
to the initial revision would change each sha1 sum), so adding this
concept to git now would probably break all of it :-\.

-- 
Matthieu