Re: reftable [v5]: new ref storage format

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 8, 2017, 07:38 UTC
Message-ID: <20170808073806.ofrxcvgg3f6zaudu@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAJo=hJsEaKH40WnhxqvkASpiXnV8ipc+b1zrZ9VEjqRjpJ17Qg@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, Aug 07, 2017 at 07:41:43AM -0700, Shawn Pearce wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> > As such if JGit wanted to use a longer key size, it is possible to implement
> > similar automatic builds and packaging into JGit.
> 
> I don't know if we need a larger key size. $DAY_JOB limits ref names
> to ~200 bytes in a hook. I think GitHub does similar. But I'm worried
> about the general masses who might be using our software and expect
> ref names thus far to be as long as PATH_MAX on their system. Most
> systems run PATH_MAX around 1024.

GitHub limits to 255 (for the fully-qualified name, so including "refs/heads/"). I don't recall ever seeing any complaints about that, though I suppose it's not out of the realm of possibility for somebody with a multi-byte encoding to hit with a real name (it's configurable, so I'm not sure if Enterprise customers in Asia might ever bump it). I do think something like 1024 would be well into "you're insane if you really want to name your branch this" territory.

-Peff