Re: Branch names with slashes

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Dec 16, 2011, 00:10 UTC
Message-ID: <7vhb11l6ki.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <4EEA777C.6040607@alum.mit.edu>

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

> I don't believe that it would be possible to relax this limitations
> without at least a little breakage of backwards compatibility.

I do not think it is worth it, but you _could_ update your git to use a file whose name is "refs/heads/.foo/bar" as the representation of foo/bar branch and refs.c API, especially the ones close to resolve_ref(), should be the only ones that need to know about this. While walking the filesystem in refs/ hierarchy, any directory you see whose name do not begin with dot you would treat it as a legacy one and perhaps rename it to match the new convention on the fly.

> What is the bottom line?  Feel free to submit patches to improve the
> documentation or error reporting.  But I doubt that the underlying
> limitation will be removed.

I do not think so either. It is not even a limitation but is a basic nature of "hierarchical names".