Re: Git shouldn't allow to push a new branch called HEAD

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Nov 14, 2011, 20:26 UTC
Message-ID: <20111114202642.GB26269@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vbosejvx8.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 12:22:59PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> 
> > So one solution is to block fetching of remote branches called HEAD
> > (which I would be OK with). But another is...
> > ... Obviously there's a lot more to it than just tweaking the default fetch
> > refspecs. The ref lookup rules need to be changed to take this into
> > account. There was some discussion about this over the summer (under the
> > subject of possible "1.8.0" changes), but I don't think any work has
> > been done.
> 
> I would say discussing and ironing out the kinks of the design counts as
> work, but I agree nobody was seriously interested in laying out a sensible
> transition plan and discussion died out before anything concrete happened.

Yeah, I should have said "...has been done since then".

> Regardless of the layout chanage, which probably is a 2.X topic, I think a
> good first step would be to start forbidding anything that ends with _?HEAD
> as a branch or tag name, on top of Michael's "enforce the refname rules more
> vigorously when a ref is created" series.

Agreed. Changing the layout is a long-term fix, and I think disallowing HEAD is a reasonable stop-gap measure.

-Peff