Re: [PATCH 0/4] Pulling refs files

> On Tue, 17 May 2005, Petr Baudis wrote:
> 
> > Dear diary, on Tue, May 17, 2005 at 11:20:54PM CEST, I got a letter
> > where Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org> told me that...
> > > Hmm... maybe the right thing is to make the implementation-provided
> > > transfer code handle arbitrary things in GIT_DIR, but have code for
> > > updating reference files atomically and using a reference file to start
> > > from use "refs/"? Certainly, there's nothing special about reference files
> > > in transit.
> > > 
> > > Certainly the things in the info/ directory shouldn't be treated a head
> > > that you're going to pull, so that has to be different above the protocol
> > > level anyway.
> > 
> > *confused* :) I'm sorry, I have trouble understanding this. Could you
> > rephrase, please?
> 
> If you want to get info/ignore, you want to get it and save it, not
> download a set of objects it refers to. So it's different from specifying
> that you want to use refs/heads/master as the starting point for a pull.

> > > So the remote receiver should get an instruction: change X from OLD to NEW
> > > and pull NEW. It should:
> > > 
> > >  - lock the file against further updates
> > >  - check that the current value is the provided OLD
> > >  - pull the necessary objects
> > >  - write NEW to the file
> > - unlock the file ;-))
> 
> The way I'm actually doing things is to write NEW into the lock file at
> some arbitrary point, and "writing to the file" is actually renaming the
> lock file to the normal filename. So writing unlocks the file
> automatically.