Passing checkout_branch to pygit2.clone_repository() triggers a fatal error

[djmattyg007]

Whenever I try and clone any repository with something like the following command:

repo = pygit2.clone_repository(url="file:///srv/samba/files/programming/cli/modman-test", path="/tmp/modman")

The entire contents of the repo are staged for deletion.

I tried to get around this by passing 'checkout_branch="master"' to the clone_repository() function (as this fixes the issue just fine when I run 'git checkout master' from my shell), but that triggers a fatal error.

[carlosmn]

Which error? Which is the active branch in the source repository?

[djmattyg007]

The active branch is master. This is line of code I'm trying to run:

repo = pygit2.clone_repository(url="file:///srv/samba/files/programming/cli/modman-test", path="/tmp/modman", checkout_branch="master")

And this is the full error I get:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "modman.py", line 8, in <module>
repo = git.clone_repository(url="file:///srv/samba/files/programming/cli/modman-test", path="/tmp/modman", checkout_branch="master")
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/site-packages/pygit2/__init__.py", line 156, in clone_repository
checkout_branch_ref = ffi.new('char []', branch)
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/site-packages/cffi/api.py", line 225, in new
return self._backend.newp(cdecl, init)
TypeError: initializer for ctype 'char[]' must be a bytes or list or tuple, not str

[djmattyg007]

I've just discovered that the "test_clone_checkout_branch" test in the repository test suite is commented out because it's broken, which probably explains why this use case isn't working for me.

I feel like the documentation should be updated to reflect this until it is fixed, as it can be quite frustrating for someone who doesn't know.

[carlosmn]

The test is commented out for a different reason, explained in the comment block. As you can see from the error message, the issue here is down to a type mismatch, which looks like a missing to_bytes() when setting up the struct.