Re: [PATCH] Disallow '\' in ref names

From: Johannes Sixt <j.sixt@viscovery.net>
Date: May 8, 2009, 07:17 UTC
Message-ID: <4A03DC9C.2050204@viscovery.net>
In-Reply-To: <4A03D776.6070309@op5.se>

Andreas Ericsson schrieb:

Show 11 quoted lines

> Robin Rosenberg wrote:
>> This is asking for trouble since '\' is a directory separator in
>> Windows and thus may produce unpredictable results.
>>
> 
> NAK. We allow / on unixy systems, and that's the path separator there.
> Junio even makes extensive use of it to create per-contributor
> namespaces for topic-branches.
> 
> Are you guessing this might be a problem in the future, or have you
> actually run into it?

This is not possible on Windows:

$ git update-ref refs/heads/foo\bar HEAD fatal: Unable to create '.git/refs/heads/foo\bar.lock': No such file or directory

The problem is that git doesn't create the directory .git/refs/heads/foo because the ref handling only mkdir()s directories that were split off from the ref at forward-slashes.

The decision not to mangle command line arguments that are refs (on Windows) was intentional. (We do mangle pathspec, i.e. we convert '\' to '/'.) But back then I did not think about what should happen if a ref contains a backslash.

BTW, it's the same problem with backslash in path components: Just don't do that if you want to be cross-platfrom.

-- Hannes