Re: What's cooking in git.git (Jan 2012, #08; Tue, 31)

Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] writes:

It turns out that this series, as a side effect, fixes a long-standing bug
that the --branch option cannot be used with the --mirror option.

I am tempted to merge it also to 1.7.9.1 maintenance track. The issue is
minor (you can always clone with --mirror and then switch the branch with
"checkout") and it does not look like it warrants further backpointing to
1.7.8 and older releases, though.

Comments and/or objections?

Replying to myself.

Regardless of "'refs/heads/$branch' is not found because we do not look
for in the right place" issue, shouldn't the use of the --mirror without
the --bare option forbidden or at least warned about?

Cloning as --mirror, with a working tree with a current branch, would mean
the next fetch would directly try to update it by overwriting.  We do pass
the --update-head-ok from pull, so "git pull" in such a repository should
be "sort of" safe, as long as the repository is never used to create its
own commits on whatever local branches set to be overwritten by --mirror,
but still I have this gut feeling that such an arrangement should at least
be discouraged.

Comments and/or opinions?