From: Junio C Hamano Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:10:37 GMT Subject: Re: Branch names with slashes Message-ID: <7vhb11l6ki.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: <4EEA777C.6040607@alum.mit.edu> Michael Haggerty 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".