Re: [PATCH] disallow refs containing successive slashes

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 11, 2009, 18:52 UTC
Message-ID: <7vbpkdwyo2.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <4AD1B6A4.8060405@web.de>

Jens Lehmann <Jens.Lehmann@web.de> writes:

Show 17 quoted lines

>>> I became aware of this issue while looking into problems occuring
>>> when a user created a branch starting with a '/' in git gui (e.g.
>>> "/foo"). Strange things happen, while git gui shows the current
>>> branch as "/foo" under the hood a branch "foo" (without the slash)
>>> had been created. But then you can't delete "/foo" from git gui,
>>> because a branch of that name doesn't exist.
>> 
>> Perhaps an interface to give a cleaned-up version, e.g.
>> 
>>     $ git check-ref-format --print refs/heads//foo/bar
>>     refs/heads/foo/bar
>> 
>> is what you want in order to fix git-gui?  I dunno.
>
> Yes, one solution could be to fix every application handling branch, tag
> or repo names to mimic the namechange done in the bowels of git. But i
> think it is not worth the hassle.

That cuts both ways.

When the users make typoes (e.g. /foo//bar) you can accept the only sane correction (e.g. foo/bar) instead of rejecting, since the only thing the user can do after getting such a rejection is to correct it to that corrected name (e.g. foo/bar) himself and re-issue the command anyway. You can push the "hassle" down to the user, or you can fix the tool to remove the hassle from the user.

Besides, by rejecting what we used to accept you are breaking people's expectations. So I am moderately negative, unless you can say your "every application" is literally _tons_.