This wsa discussed in slack, where a user was missing the Git commit ID in his custom build
Reson is/was `git clone --single-branch -b 1.4.0-epa1 https://github.com/vyos/vyos-build` checks out the `1.4.0-epa1` tag as HEAD and does not clone any branch information.
This results in:
```
>>> import git
>>> repo = git.Repo('.')
>>> repo.head.object.hexsha[:14]
'bcac2eb1f9b49c'
>>> git_branch = repo.active_branch.name
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/git/repo/base.py", line 881, in active_branch
return self.head.reference
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/git/refs/symbolic.py", line 311, in _get_reference
raise TypeError("%s is a detached symbolic reference as it points to %r" % (self, sha))
TypeError: HEAD is a detached symbolic reference as it points to 'bcac2eb1f9b49cc15ebda65838e5465543dbb9c6'
```
during the build. The exception handler resets the branch and commit name to an empty string: https://github.com/vyos/vyos-build/blob/a3e60a00b400a1bad8609d5ce1abb0bb7abed7bc/scripts/build-vyos-image#L281-L296
This now adds a proper error message during build:
```
(07:46) vyos_bld 08278c5a1172:/vyos/vyos-build # isobuild -test
Building custom VyOS version: 1.5-test-202402250746
I: Checking if packages required for VyOS image build are installed
build/config
Could not retrieve information from git: HEAD is a detached symbolic reference as it points to '39612f541e55bea19868f50f16d7a6c6e0034ed2'
```