On Wed, Aug 08, 2007 at 13:59:38 -0500, Sparks, Sam wrote:
quoted text
> Hello All,
>=20
> Please excuse me if this is an ignorant question; I'm new to git and my
> have overlooked something in the documentation.
>=20
> I'm attempting to obtain a snapshot of source code from an unlabeled git
> branch in a public repository. I've found in the documentation that a
> timestamp cannot be used to specify a particular version of source code,
> but I believe I can work with the commit value as returned by 'git
> show'.

Clone and pull, over git protocol, only ask the server for objects referenc=
ed
by any refs -- plus all objects those depend on. Which does not necessarily
mean all commits, because references may be removed.

If a branch (ie. ref in refs/heads) is removed or rewound (moved to point to
commit that is not descendant of what it pointed to before), some commits m=
ay
become dangling. Clone and pull won't know such commits exist and therefore
won't be able to ask server to provide them.

quoted text
> However, I have been unsuccessful in my attempts to use this identifier
> to clone or checkout the associated source tree. Has anyone been
> successful in using git to successfully replicate an unlabeled version
> of sources in a repository?
>=20
> Here is my latest attempt:
> /dir_i_want_to_replicate $ git show --pretty=3Dshort
> commit 5b1313fb2758ffce8b624457f777d8cc6709608d
> Author: ....

I bet that if you do 'git lost-found' here, it will find something and this
commit will be among the finds, or predecessor of one of them.

quoted text
> /replication_dir $ git clone git://www.denx.de/git/u-boot.git
> u-boot-mpc83xx
> Blah blah blah..
>  100% (4378/4378) done
> /replication_dir/u-boot-mpc83xx/ $ git checkout
> 5b1313fb2758ffce8b624457f777d8cc6709608d
> error: pathspec '5b1313fb2758ffce8b624457f777d8cc6709608d' did not match
> any.=20

It seems that git pull only accepts refs as arguments. So you'll have to
create a branch at that commit in the origin to get it over to destination.

--=20
						 Jan 'Bulb' Hudec <bulb@ucw.cz>