Re: git-svn and huge data and modifying the git-svn-HEAD branch directly

Dear diary, on Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 10:40:01AM CET, I got a letter where Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se> said that...

Actually, I've hit this recently when supporting an unhappy user on #git, and I didn't manage to find anything in the archives (but perhaps I missed it). Is there a particular reason why tags are checked first than branches?

Why not:

(i) I _think_ that it would be less of a surprise if a branch would be checked first.

(ii) E.g. Cogito output (cg-status -g) is very confusing when you have a naming clash - cg-object-id foo will show tag commit ID, but cg-status -g will say that the "foo" branch has a different commit ID (and it is _right_).

(iii) Many operations will stop making sense (cg-merge foo, and even cg-fetch foo will be confused), while in case of the opposite way I can't think of any command still not making sense.

(iv) A security hole when you auto-fetch tags from remote repositories
- you could then be misled to merge something totally different when the
attacker will introduce a naming clash to your refs hierarchy.

Actually, I'm almost inclined to suggest making Git fail violently in case of an ambiguous name.