From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Subject: Re: Cloning empty repositories, was Re: What is the idea for bare repositories?
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:59:25 -0800
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Cc: Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>,
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To: Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se>
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Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se> writes:

> Johannes Schindelin wrote:
>
>> But since you're one of the people knowing git _internals_ pretty
>> well, here's another reason just for you why this cannot be done:
>> There is no way to find out where the HEAD points to.
>
> $ mkdir foo; cd foo; git init; git symbolic-ref -q HEAD
> refs/heads/master

Johannes is talking about the lack of native protocol support to
transfer symref information.  That's the reason git-clone dances
around finding where HEAD really points at.  It simply does not
know -- all it gets about a symref is what SHA-1 the ref points
at.