On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 4:25 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Checking out a random branch is absolutely the worst thing you can > do. Personally, I would think that the best thing you can do is to > educate your users not to clone from a void. Create some history > that is worth sharing, and then push into an empty repository. Users are dumb. Consider a website like GitHub where you create a repository on a a remote server. It is initialized as an empty repo. They now want to clone that empty repo to work with it: git clone https://example.com/foo cd foo .... hack hack git commit -a -m "Foo is awesome!" git push This works from git-core servers because the ref advertisement tells the client its an empty repo and its OK to checkout HEAD from nothing and its all fine. This fails from a JGit server because the ref advertisement for an empty repository differs and disagrees with the format used by git-core. The result is a confused client spewing an odd checkout message. -- 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