Re: git-am with an initial checkin doesn't work

Am 14.07.2009 20:24 schrieb Junio C Hamano:

Dirk Süsserott [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

# Try to "import" the patch:
git am 0001-initial-checkin.patch

The latter yields to
fatal: HEAD: not a valid SHA1
fatal: bad revision 'HEAD'

It works, when I
git apply 0001-initial-checkin.patch
instead of am'ing it, but then the thing isn't committed and I've to
manually git-commit it.

Is this a bug, intentional behavior, or am I missing some magic option
to git-am?

The original mode of operation of the e-mail patchflow commands was to
support project members who contribute changes to _existing_ projects, and
maintainers to accept such changes.  The reason behind the behaviour you
are observing is merely a historical accident that nobody bothered about
use cases outside of that original purpose.  For exactly the same reason,
the original implementation of format-patch did not bother with the root
commit.

IOW, this was not an intentional behaviour, neither it was a bug.  It was
simply use outside of spec, and nobody bothered until f79d4c8 (git-am:
teach git-am to apply a patch to an unborn branch, 2009-04-10), which is
v1.6.3-rc1~11^2, added a support for it.

What version of git are you running?

Hi Junio,

I used "1.6.1.9.g97c34" which is an msysGit release and not exactly the 
latest. I now updated to "1.6.3.2.1299.gee46c" and the problem 
dissapeared. Thanks for the hint and sorry for the noise.

     -- Dirk