title: Git clone: "You appear to have cloned an empty repository"
body: <p>Some colleagues and I have been working on a project stored in a private git repository.  Historically, there have been no problems, but recently I attempted to clone, and got the following problem:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Cloning into 'project'...
  warning: You appear to have cloned an empty repository.
  Checking connectivity... done.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>A <code>git log</code> provides:</p>
  
  <p>fatal: your current branch 'master' does not have any commits yet</p>
  
  <p>This isn't correct - my colleague pushed plenty of (nonempty) changes on Dec. 6 (although now that branch isn't showing on a --single-branch clone attempt).  When he ssh's into the git repository, there is plenty of directory structure there.</p>
  
  <p>So my questions:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>How could this have happened?</li>
  <li>How can we recover the repository?  It seems the stuff is on the remote repo, but for some reason, it isn't aware that it's there.</li>
  </ol>