Hi Peff & Jeff ;-) On Wed, 20 Jul 2016, Jeff King wrote: > On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 02:20:24PM -0400, Jeff Hostetler wrote: > > > > IIRC, it happens when HEAD points to a broken ref. So something like: > > > > > > git init > > > echo broken >.git/refs/heads/master > > > > > > would cause resolving HEAD to return NULL. > > > > That worked and I see "(unknown)". > > > > This is a bit of a nit, but is there a value we'd like > > to see there, such as "(unknown)" or "(broken)" or "(missing)" > > in that case? (And make it clear that this is a different > > case from "(detached)".) > > > > I'm thinking it would be nicer to always have a field > > there for parsing. > > My gut feeling is to err on the side of being vague, like "unknown". > This is something that _shouldn't_ ever happen, and if it does, it could > be a broken on-disk ref, a transient syscall error, or some other > weirdness. I don't think we need to get too specific in this context > (we'll likely have said something else useful on stderr already, I > think). FWIW I think "unknown" is a nice conservative way to shrug Git's shoulders. When we call `git status --porcelain=v2` and read "unknown", we could always try to find out more using additional low-level tools and/or disk access: this is such a rare case that it does not *really* matter all that much. Ciao, Dscho -- 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