Subject: Re: [PATCH] Fix overwritten remote ref on with fast-import.

From: Jonathan Nieder <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2012 19:30:25 -0500

Hi Florian,

Florian Achleitner wrote:

> After importing new commits on top of refs/remotes/* the
> ref was overwritten with the local refs/heads/master, because the name
> of the remote reference to fetch, i.e. refs/heads/master, was used to
> retrieve old_sha1 for it's local counterpart. Therefore, old_sha1 pointed
> to the local head which was not contained in the remote branch and couldn't
> be updated (printing a warning ..).

I assume you are talking about the status quo here.  It's easy to
forget that others have not already applied your patch, but using the
present tense would make reading easier.  Think of the patch
description as a special kind of bug report.

Unfortunately, as a bug report, the above is lacking some detail.  Do
I understand correctly that some remote helper is failing when git
invokes its 'import' command?  What are the symptoms?  If it prints a
warning, what is the exact warning?

Does that remote helper advertise the 'refspec' capability?  If so,
what refspec does it use?  If not, why not?

It might seem silly to ask for these things when you're providing a
fix along with the report!  However, if someone else runs into the
same symptoms, they need to be able to find your patch quickly; if
your patch has a bad side-effect then we need to know why not to
revert it; and if someone new starts working on the same area of code,
they need to know what bugs to avoid reintroducing.

Curious,
Jonathan