ls-refs: report unborn targets of symrefs

When cloning, we choose the default branch based on the remote HEAD.
But if there is no remote HEAD reported (which could happen if the
target of the remote HEAD is unborn), we'll fall back to using our local
init.defaultBranch. Traditionally this hasn't been a big deal, because
most repos used "master" as the default. But these days it is likely to
cause confusion if the server and client implementations choose
different values (e.g., if the remote started with "main", we may choose
"master" locally, create commits there, and then the user is surprised
when they push to "master" and not "main").

To solve this, the remote needs to communicate the target of the HEAD
symref, even if it is unborn, and "git clone" needs to use this
information.

Currently, symrefs that have unborn targets (such as in this case) are
not communicated by the protocol. Teach Git to advertise and support the
"unborn" feature in "ls-refs" (by default, this is advertised, but
server administrators may turn this off through the lsrefs.unborn
config). This feature indicates that "ls-refs" supports the "unborn"
argument; when it is specified, "ls-refs" will send the HEAD symref with
the name of its unborn target.

This change is only for protocol v2. A similar change for protocol v0
would require independent protocol design (there being no analogous
position to signal support for "unborn") and client-side plumbing of the
data required, so the scope of this patch set is limited to protocol v2.

The client side will be updated to use this in a subsequent commit.

Signed-off-by: Jonathan Tan <jonathantanmy@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 10 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/technical/protocol-v2.txt b/Documentation/technical/protocol-v2.txt
index 85daeb5d9e..f772d90eaf 100644
--- a/Documentation/technical/protocol-v2.txt
+++ b/Documentation/technical/protocol-v2.txt
@@ -192,11 +192,20 @@ ls-refs takes in the following arguments:
 	When specified, only references having a prefix matching one of
 	the provided prefixes are displayed.
 
+If the 'unborn' feature is advertised the following argument can be
+included in the client's request.
+
+    unborn
+	The server will send information about HEAD even if it is a symref
+	pointing to an unborn branch in the form "unborn HEAD
+	symref-target:<target>".
+
 The output of ls-refs is as follows:
 
     output = *ref
 	     flush-pkt
-    ref = PKT-LINE(obj-id SP refname *(SP ref-attribute) LF)
+    obj-id-or-unborn = (obj-id | "unborn")
+    ref = PKT-LINE(obj-id-or-unborn SP refname *(SP ref-attribute) LF)
     ref-attribute = (symref | peeled)
     symref = "symref-target:" symref-target
     peeled = "peeled:" obj-id