From: Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2026 13:10:31 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 1/2] rebase: skip branch symref aliases
Message-ID: <0844b4e0-679b-4c0a-bea1-5779b4d0489d@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqwludan2m.fsf@gitster.g>



On 29/07/2026 15:26, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>>> But that was about a low level mechanism that must be more lenient
>>> to be usable as repair tools to recover from such a broken state,
>>> no?
>>
>> It checks the new value of HEAD, not the old one so I don't think so.
>> The commit message talks about topgit using "git symbolic-ref" to set
>> head outside "refs/heads/" - peff had previously tried to tighten it to
>> reject non-branch refs but that broke topgit. I've just had a quick look
>> at the topgit code and still sets HEAD to point to "refs/top-bases/..."
>> by default[1], although there are plans to start using
>> "refs/heads/{top-bases}/..." instead.
> 
> Ah, that name vaguely rings a bell.  Is it still in use, and now
> they prevent us from forbidding funny characters like {} in the
> refname?  Sigh...

Yes, it still seems to be maintained, I guess they chose the funny 
characters to try and avoid name collisions because no-one would want 
them in a "normal" branch name.

Thanks

Phillip

>> ... It
>> appears topgit's rebase command is built around "git rebase"[2] so I
>> think we need to continue to support rebasing a non-branch HEAD.
> 
> Sigh, again, but OK.
> 
> Thanks.
>