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Command "git diff {branch}...HEAD" fails (master fetch doesn't help)

See original GitHub issue

Jenkins SCM module does the following (minimal representation, it actually does a few more things):

git checkout git@github.com:<path>.git <dir>
cd <dir>
git checkout -f <commit-hash>

If I invoke git diff {branch}...HEAD (as is done by diff-cover), I get the same error as is produced when running diff-cover:

Use '--' to separate paths from revisions, like this:
'git <command> [<revision>...] -- [<file>...]'

Preceding the diff with the recommended fetch does not work either:

git fetch origin $(TARGET_BRANCH):refs/remotes/origin/$(TARGET_BRANCH)

In this case, TARGET_BRANCH is “master”, which is the repo’s default branch.

Output of “git branch”:

% git branch
* (HEAD detached at 0fcb182)
  master

The full Jenkins SCM operation looks like this:

 > git rev-parse --is-inside-work-tree # timeout=10
Fetching changes from the remote Git repository
 > git config remote.origin.url git@github.com:<repo-path> # timeout=10
Fetching upstream changes from git@github.com:<repo-path>
 > git --version # timeout=10
using GIT_SSH to set credentials 
 > git -c core.askpass=true fetch --tags --progress git@github.com:<repo-path> +refs/pull/*:refs/remotes/origin/pr/* +refs/heads/master:refs/remotes/origin/master
 > git rev-parse 0fcb1822ad5bcf71b9e0c7cddb85dcd5a54d4967^{commit} # timeout=10
Checking out Revision 0fcb1822ad5bcf71b9e0c7cddb85dcd5a54d4967 (detached)
 > git config core.sparsecheckout # timeout=10
 > git checkout -f 0fcb1822ad5bcf71b9e0c7cddb85dcd5a54d4967
 > git rev-list 7ea84cf781acc06bb72767860dc1132d5663a90d # timeout=10

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 7 years ago
Reactions:1
Comments:6 (4 by maintainers)

Top GitHub Comments

2reactions

f18mcommented, Dec 26, 2020

Hi @twall , @Bachmann1234 , I think I hit a similar problem. In my case I’m not using Jenkins but rather Teamcity. Also Teamcity does something like “git checkout -f <commit-hash>” at some point and thus clones the git repo in a “HEAD detached” condition (https://www.git-tower.com/learn/git/faq/detached-head-when-checkout-commit/). I tried and indeed a command like “git diff origin/develop…HEAD” in such condition fails with error

fatal: ambiguous argument 'origin/develop..HEAD': unknown revision or path not in the working tree. Use '--' to separate paths from revisions, like this: 'git <command> [<revision>...] -- [<file>...]'

I’m not sure how to workaround this… any solution or workaround so far ?

0reactions

dmcconnell-mcommented, Nov 23, 2021

I was able to get this to work in GitHub Actions by doing 2 separate checkouts in my workflow (1 for master / main first, then the branch / ref that triggered the workflow, my PR branch in my case):

      - name: Check out the repo
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          ref: master
      - name: Check out the repo
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Set up Python
        uses: actions/setup-python@v1
        with:
          python-version: "3.7"
      - name: Install diff_cover
        run: |
          python -m pip install --upgrade pip
          pip install diff_cover
      - run: diff-cover coverage.xml --compare-branch=origin/master --diff-range-notation '..'

I have added this in case anyone else is trying to get diff_cover working with GitHub Actions