@mbishopim3 reported an issue in IRC:

mbishopim3: epriestley: "Error updating working copy: Commit "" has not been discovered yet! Run discovery before updating refs." any ideas?

I can't reproduce it and it went away for him, but one theory is that we're getting here and git/hg are spitting out nothing, which we incorrectly parse as array("") when we intend array().

Pushed some new commits, ran bin/repositoy refs X, got expected results.

I can't actually reproduce the bug, but this might fix it and appears to make the code more correct.