Re: Buggy handling of non-canonical ref names

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 24, 2011, 18:40 UTC
Message-ID: <7vaaayps9z.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <4E551D70.9080509@alum.mit.edu>

Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> writes:

> What is the policy about reference names and their canonicalization?

The overall policy has been that we care about well-formed input, and everything else is "undefined", even though as you found out some of them try to work sensibly.

Show 5 quoted lines

>     $ git check-ref-format /foo/bar ; echo $?
>     0
>
>     $ git check-ref-format --print /foo/bar
>     /foo/bar

I think these are bogus. Patches welcome.

Show 9 quoted lines

> However, creating a reference with such a name is equivalent to creating
> a reference without the leading slash:
>
>     $ git update-ref /foo/bar HEAD
>     $ cat .git/foo/bar
>     ef6cf90ba11dd6205f8b974692d795ea0b1c0bdd
>     $ git branch /bar/baz
>     $ git for-each-ref | grep baz
>     ef6cf90ba11dd6205f8b974692d795ea0b1c0bdd commit refs/heads/bar/baz

These are just examples of "undefined being nice to the user as a bonus".