Re: Some issues working with empty/bare repositories...

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Sat, Mar 01, 2008 at 07:40:39PM +0000, Reece Dunn wrote:

> Consider the following workflow:
> 
>     $ mkdir foo
>     $ cd foo
>     $ git --bare init
> 
>     $ git log
>     fatal: bad default revision 'HEAD'
> 
> This message is confusing for a newbie. Displaying "no commits" would
> make more sense here.

The tricky thing here is that "git log" doesn't know we have no
commits in the repo; it only knows that HEAD is bogus. But it may be
that we can just say something like:

  fatal: unable to resolve HEAD; do you have any commits?

>     $ git clone foo bar
>     Initialized empty Git repository in /home/reece/bar/.git/
>     $ ls -a /home/reece
>     . .. foo

As of 1.5.4, this now says "fatal: cannot clone empty repository". There
has been work recently on a C version of clone which tries to match the
sequence of "init && remote add && fetch && checkout" more closely. I
haven't looked closely, but I suspect it may just work (by which I mean
create an empty repo with origin config pointing to the parent repo).

> It appears from the git output (with the inconsistently capitalized
> git - see --version output above) that the clone succeeded, but it
> does not create bar/.git/, even though it said that it did.

It did create it...it just deleted it afterwards without telling you. :)

-Peff