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

On Wed, Nov 14, 2007 at 11:32:32AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

We already spent quite a lot of time on this thread, and at
least to me I feel that my time would have been better spent if
instead I were looking at patches on some other topics, or
working on cleaning up cherry-pick/revert implementation.

Personally, I think cloning empty repositories should be allowed, but
there are many more interesting things to be working on right now.
However, I think the current behavior of not printing anything is quite
bad, so here is a productive email that didn't take too long to write.

-- >8 --
git-clone: print an error message when trying to clone empty repo

Previously, cloning an empty repository looked like this:

$ (mkdir parent && cd parent && git --bare init)
$ git-clone parent child
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/peff/clone/child/.git/
$ cd child
-bash: cd: child: No such file or directory
$ echo 'wtf?' | mail git@vger.kernel.org

Now we at least report that the clone was not successful.

---

diff --git a/git-clone.sh b/git-clone.sh
index 18003ab..e2b7a9c 100755
--- a/git-clone.sh
+++ b/git-clone.sh

@@ -278,7 +278,8 @@ yes)
 				      find objects -type f -print | sed -e 1q)
 			# objects directory should not be empty because
 			# we are cloning!
-			test -f "$repo/$sample_file" || exit
+			test -f "$repo/$sample_file" ||
+				die "fatal: cannot clone empty repository"
 			if ln "$repo/$sample_file" "$GIT_DIR/objects/sample" 2>/dev/null
 			then
 				rm -f "$GIT_DIR/objects/sample"