Subject: Re: [SOLVED] `git fetch tag NAME' into mirror repo does not update HEAD, what to do?

From: Tomas Carnecky <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2010 14:32:41 +0200

On 8/12/10 2:16 PM, Brian Foster wrote:
>  NO.  ‘get checkout ...’ does not work in a bare repository.
>  (You can modify my trivial posted script to prove this.)
> 
>  However, your comment got me to thinking.  This _does_ work:
> 
>     git reset --soft FETCH_HEAD
> 
>  (And, I presume without testing, so would ‘... v2’ ?)
>  Given that git-reset(1)'s purpose is to change the branch's
>  head (or to change HEAD as I've been incorrectly describing
>  it), that does make sense.

I expected git checkout to work even in a bare repo - as you can see I
don't work that often inside bare repos :).

You should use update-ref instead of reset. The problem with reset is
that it changes the branch and not HEAD. Say initially your mirror had
HEAD as symref pointing to refs/heads/master. When you run reset --soft
v2 your master branch will now point to the same commit as the tag v2
(and HEAD will be still pointing to refs/heads/master). When you use
'git update-ref --no-deref HEAD v2' it will modify HEAD directly and
have it point directly to the same commit as v2 (also called detached HEAD).

tom