submodule: fall back to remote's HEAD for missing remote.<name>.branch

When `remote.<name>.branch` is not configured, `git submodule update`
currently falls back to using the branch name `master`. A much better
idea, however, is to use the remote `HEAD`: on all Git servers running
reasonably recent Git versions, the symref `HEAD` points to the main
branch.

Note: t7419 demonstrates that there _might_ be use cases out there that
_expect_ `git submodule update --remote` to update submodules to the
remote `master` branch even if the remote `HEAD` points to another
branch. Arguably, this patch makes the behavior more intuitive, but
there is a slight possibility that this might cause regressions in
obscure setups.

Even so, it should be okay to fix this behavior without anything like a
longer transition period:

- The `git submodule update --remote` command is not really common.

- Current Git's behavior when running this command is outright
  confusing, unless the remote repository's current branch _is_ `master`
  (in which case the proposed behavior matches the old behavior).

- If a user encounters a regression due to the changed behavior, the fix
  is actually trivial: setting `submodule.<name>.branch` to `master`
  will reinstate the old behavior.

Helped-by: Philippe Blain <levraiphilippeblain@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/builtin/submodule--helper.c b/builtin/submodule--helper.c
index 46c03d2a12..f55f7b7704 100644
--- a/builtin/submodule--helper.c
+++ b/builtin/submodule--helper.c
@@ -1981,7 +1981,7 @@ static const char *remote_submodule_branch(const char *path)
 	free(key);
 
 	if (!branch)
-		return "master";
+		return "HEAD";
 
 	if (!strcmp(branch, ".")) {
 		const char *refname = resolve_ref_unsafe("HEAD", 0, NULL, NULL);