Re: mirror clone does not keep HEAD updated

[Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Apr 4, 2023 at 11:35 AM Daniel Martí <mvdan@mvdan.cc> wrote:
>
> I'm testing `git clone --mirror` to properly mirror a repository on
> github.com. It appears to be working well, except for keeping HEAD
> correctly in place.

Git does not set or update the remote HEAD, that's something the user
is supposed to do (for some reason).

The only exception is when cloning a repository.

In my opinion this is completely unintuitive and unhelpful. 99.99% of
the time I want the remote HEAD to be pointing to where the remote's
HEAD is pointing to.

I implemented patches to fix that [1], but they were never merged.

It's particularly wrong when you are mirroring a repository, as in your case.

> Am I holding the mirror wrong somehow? As far as the manpages say, `git
> remote update` should be enough to fully mirror all refs.

That's what I would expect, but that's not true.

I find that most of the time I need to read git's code to actually
understand what it's supposed to do. I don't bother reading the
documentation.

I've updated my old RFC patch adding tests and an option to make it
work with mirrored repositories as well. With
`fetch.updateHead=always` the mirrored clone always has the HEAD
up-to-date.

Cheers.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/20201118091219.3341585-1-felipe.contreras@gmail.com/
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/git/20230405012742.2452208-1-felipe.contreras@gmail.com/T/#ma012c4823814936a3ab8755d1d2b805d61b43133

-- 
Felipe Contreras