From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 03:11:11 GMT
Subject: Re: Regarding Git and Branch Naming
Message-ID: <20200627031111.GB1187031@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <6b9d76e4-68dd-8e57-f96a-318579dea6f3@iee.email>

On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 10:33:14PM +0100, Philip Oakley wrote:

> A wild bikeshed question: Is HEAD itself protected as a branch name e.g.
> that HEAD could contain `ref: HEAD` or `ref: refs/heads/HEAD`? (or maybe
> the null  oid

The first is not legal; we insist that symrefs start with "refs/".  The
second one _is_ legal, but isn't any kind of loop. The HEAD symref is
.git/HEAD, which is distinct from a ref of the same name inside
refs/heads/.

It's confusing, of course, because the lookup rules make it hard to
refer to refs/heads/HEAD. For that reason we do disallow it from the
branch-creation porcelains like git-branch and git-checkout.

-Peff