When I create an empty FileRepository or InMemoryRepository and serve it using Daemon to a C Git (1.8.4.2 or 1.9.0) client, I get a warning during checkout:
% git clone git://localhost/repo.git
Cloning into 'repo'...
Checking connectivity... done.
warning: remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref, unable to checkout.
This checkout failure also results in the omission of the standard branch.master.* settings that usually end up in .git/config after the clone:
[branch "master"]
remote = origin
merge = refs/heads/master
rebase = true
This does not occur for repositories served by C Git:
% git clone git://localhost/another-repo.git
Cloning into 'another-repo'...
warning: You appear to have cloned an empty repository.
Checking connectivity... done
I narrowed this down to JGit responding to `git ls-remote` with the following line:
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 capabilities^{}
whereas C Git daemons serve an empty response. The C Git client seems to be interpreting the zero SHA to be the object ID for HEAD, and it fails when it can't find this object.
It seems that this functionality was added to JGit in the following commit, which fixes fetch-by-SHA1 for repos that don't have any refs to advertise:
Does anyone have any thoughts on this? It seems the proper functioning in these two scenarios (cloning an empty repo, and fetch-by-SHA1 for repos without refs to advertise) are mututally exclusive. Should I open a bug report for this?
Brian
