Hi
I came across this issue the other day while trying to optimise a fetch to a repo with release branches named release-X.X.X. I wanted to just fetch just those branches but because of the trailing slash rule I couldn't. The following StackOverflow post has details of the issue:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20450003/is-it-possible-to-use-filters-in-refspec-in-places-other-than-directory-namespac
The trailing slash rule appears to be introduced in 46220ca and further tightened in b2a5627
Before I go ahead and look at what needs to be done for a patch I thought it would be polite to ask if there is any reasoning behind the trailing slash rule that I'm missing? Or if you are interested in changing this behavior at all.
Cheers
Monte