Cargo fails at loading git dependency

[aWeinzierl]

Problem
Failure with the following reported message when trying to build repo:

error: failed to get `windows` as a dependency of package `minesweeper-rs v0.1.0 (C:\Users\andre\[directory]\minesweeper-rs)`

Caused by:
  failed to load source for dependency `windows`

Caused by:
  Unable to update https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs#031b4736

Caused by:
  the given reference name 'refs/heads/' is not valid; class=Reference (4)

Steps

1. Clone https://github.com/robmikh/minesweeper-rs
2. Switch to uwp branch
3. Delete C:\Users\andre\.cargo\git
4. Run cargo update or cargo +nightly build -Z build-std=std,panic_abort --target x86_64-uwp-windows-msvc or cargo +stable update

Notes

• deleting Cargo.lock does not help
• requiring master for windows-rs does not help

Perhaps related issues: #8957 #9133

Output of cargo version:
cargo 1.52.0-nightly (bf5a5d5 2021-02-18)
cargo 1.50.0 (f04e7fa 2021-02-04)

OS:
Windows 10.0.19042 Pro

[ehuss]

Thanks for the report. I suspect this is a duplicate of #8957. Have you tried checking the init.defaultbranch git config option as suggested in that issue?

[aWeinzierl]

I have init.defaultbranch= too.
However, I misinterpreted something so, I didn't delete C:/Users/andre/.gitconfig (or alternatively set defaultBranch = "" to defaultBranch = "master"`` before deleting C:\Users\andre\.cargo\git, so I thought the problem would lie somewhere else

Interesting that cargo cares about this setting which I have never edited (myself by hand), but it works now 👍