On: Zed Shaw: Github's Favorite Joke

[randrews]

You can't. Maybe Github lets you, git just says "fatal: 'doesnotexist' does not point to a commit."

[eropple → randrews]

'doesnotexist' wouldn't be a valid commit though, yes? From @zedshaw, when I asked him: '@edropple Yep, you can just push randomness in various ways, my favorite is: git push -f origin master:BIGASSHEX'

http://twitter.com/#!/zedshaw/statuses/75423197192921088

I don't have any git projects on my machine (migrated off of github and git a while ago), so I can't try.

[randrews → eropple]

That doesn't actually do anything though. It pushes your local master branch to a remote branch called BIGASSHEX (creating it if it doesn't exist). So if you generate a new bigass hex each time you'll end up with a ton of randomly-named branches that all point to the same commit, so they use no space.

I think he found a way to take down Github (having to do with having too many branches in a project), but not actually a hole in Git.