Re: Symbolic 'references' in Git?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Apr 14, 2011, 22:20 UTC
Message-ID: <20110414222020.GB19222@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <BANLkTik5tD5UOrDkpL8ahEgwFjT+suHACQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 05:31:13PM -0400, Chris Patti wrote:

Show 23 quoted lines

> >> Rather than resorting to manually copying the symbolic ref file
> >> around, from repo to repo, is there any way to make such a symbolic
> >> 'variable' global?
> >
> > Why not just use a tag or a branch ?
> >
> > git tag -F next-release release-3.15
> >
> >  OR
> >
> > git branch -D next-release
> > git branch next-release release-3.15
> >
> > (I personally think branches are nicer for this since tags are "supposed" to
> > be immutable.)
> >
> 
> 
> Won't either of those things create a 'next-release' that's frozen in
> time where the release-3.15 branch is *right now*?
> 
> This is for a CI system (Bamboo) so we need next-release to act as if
> we were using release-3.15 itself.

Yeah, a regular ref won't work for that. A symbolic ref is definitely what you want, but their contents are not shared via the git-protocol. So no, they won't make it across clones, fetches, or pushes. We do some ugly magic to make HEAD work.

-Peff