Ronnie Sahlberg wrote: > On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 10:46 PM, Jeff King <p...@peff.net> wrote:
>> Yeah, this weird "do not allow refs/foo" behavior has continually >> confused me. Coincidentally I just noticed a case today where >> "pack-refs" treats "refs/foo" specially for no good reason: >> >> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/255729 >> >> After much head scratching over the years, I am of the opinion that >> nobody every really _meant_ to prevent "refs/foo", and that code >> comments like the one you quote above were an attempt to document >> existing buggy behavior that was really trying to differentiate "HEAD" >> from "refs/*". That's just my opinion, though. :) It's still very puzzling to me. The comment came at the same time as the behavior, in v0.99.9~120 (git-check-ref-format: reject funny ref names, 2005-10-13). Before that, the behavior was even stranger --- it checked that there was exactly one slash in the argument. I'm willing to believe we might not want that check any more, though. [...] > There are also a lot of places where we assume that a refs will start > with "refs/heads/" and not just "refs/" > for_each_branch_ref(), log_ref_setup() (so no reflogs) is_branch() to > name a few. for_each_branch_ref is for iterating over local branches, which are defined as refs that start with refs/heads/*. Likewise, the only point of is_branch is to check whether a ref is under refs/heads/*. That's not an assumption about all refs. log_ref_setup implements the policy that there are only reflogs for: * refs where the reflog was explicitly created ("git branch --create-reflog" does this, but for some reason there's no corresponding "git update-ref --create-reflog" so people have to use mkdir directly for other refs), plus * if the '[core] logallrefupdates' configuration is enabled (and it is by default for non-bare repositories), then HEAD, refs/heads/*, refs/notes/*, and refs/remotes/*. This is documented in git-config(1) --- see core.logAllRefUpdates. That way, when tools internally use other refs (e.g., FETCH_HEAD), git doesn't have to automatically incur the cost of maintaining the reflog for those. What other refs should there be reflogs for? I haven't thought carefully about this. It definitely isn't an assumption that *all* refs will match that pattern. But it might be worth changing for other reasons. Jonathan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
