A while ago I reported a problem[1] where having: /somewhere/foo and /somewhere/foo.git as bare repositories and trying to clone them using alternates could cause git to confuse them. The "conclusion" was that I needed to do: git clone -s -n /somewhere/foo/ x to stop it looking at the .git version. Ok, fine. Ugly but I can live with it and we added the workaround[2]. I've now discovered we only half solved the problem. Whilst the alternates might get setup correctly, the branch names and revisions get fetched from the .git version still. It appears that even if you have a repository setup with an origin url of "/somewhere/foo/", when you run git fetch origin -f refs/*:refs/*, it will look at foo.git if it exists. The problem is the trailing slash is stripped off by the code in git-fetch itself. It appears to have done this since it was converted from a .sh function. It means it appears impossible to fetch the branchnames/revisions from foo when foo.git exists. I work with build systems that build complete linux systems and we're running into failures caused by this. I really need pre-existing versions of git to work so I can't even patch git to work around the problem without significant cost. So far the only way I've figured out to avoid this is to create a symlink to /somewhere/foo/ and then set url to point at the symlink. This way I can prevent it from finding the other directory. I thought I'd mention this in the hopes git can be fixed to behave better in this situation and perhaps I can drop the hacks I'm going to have to add sometime in the future. If anyone has any ideas for better workarounds I'd love to hear about them... [1] "Alternates corruption issue", 2012/1/31 [2] http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/bitbake/lib/bb/fetch2/git.py?id=64662290d3e7deb0b6093b3959c3f3eddb873893 Cheers, Richard -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html