`pub get` on a commit that's not on a branch

[dcharkes]

See flutter/flutter#60504.

pub get on a commit that's not on a branch (in this case after history was rewritten on purpose).

Should pub support commits that are not on a branch and might be GCed?

[sigurdm]

Not sure I fully understand the issue.

Why should pub get not support a commit that is not a branch? I would imagine that makes git bisect next-to-impossible.
And how would that work if you are not using git?

...Or is this about git dependencies? Even those I would be highly annoyed if not everything supported by git as a valid ref was supported.

[dcharkes]

flutter/flutter#60507.

Maybe it should be documented that pub requires to be on a valid branch, due to some internal logic that is required to do pub stuff.

[sigurdm]

How would pub know if a ref is on a branch?

[sigurdm]

due to some internal logic that is required to do pub stuff.

Still not sure I follow. Pub has (or should have) exactly the same requirements for git refs as git itself.
if you can git co it, you can have a dependency on it.

If a commit gets garbage collected that is the same issue as for all of git.

[dcharkes]

Yes, so it is not supported to have a non-branch commit checked out and run pub get.

But this happens in the wild, e.g. people rewrite their histories. And then pub get retries forever. Maybe we should improve the error message in that situation instead of retrying forever: https://logs.chromium.org/logs/dart/buildbucket/cr-buildbucket.appspot.com/8876208526460077424/+/steps/flutter_update-packages/0/stdout

[sigurdm]

Maybe we should improve the error message in that situation instead of retrying forever:

Ah - I had not understood that it would retry forever.
Yes, that should be fixed! Probably it is a duplicate of: #2242 and the retry is actually a hack in the flutter tool, not in pub itself.