Re: [PATCH 0/2] bookmarks

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Apr 26, 2007, 05:53 UTC
Message-ID: <7vmz0vu1fc.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0704252332170.18446@beast.quantumfyre.co.uk>

Julian Phillips <julian@quantumfyre.co.uk> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> While I like the idea of private tags, I find the idea of them having 
> their own namespace to be much more attractive than simply having the 
> ability to not export lightweight tags.
>
> In particular it means that you can control which tags are exported 
> individually.

I do not think this is limited to tags. Sometimes you may want to make some branches private. It probably is also a good idea to hide StGIT patch base refs that live under $GIT_DIR/refs/.

Here, I do not use the word "private" in the sense of being "secret", as most likely branches that share common root would have many trees and blobs in common, but in the sense of "less clutter".

How would one find out about remote refs? By running ls-remote. And that happens to also be how git-fetch follows tags (the original issue Andy had).

Over native git protocol, upload-pack is the program that runs in the repote repository and gives list of available refs and object names they point at (upload-pack.c::send_ref()). To dumb clients, update-server-info creates the equivalent information in $GIT_DIR/info/refs and that is what the ls-remote sees.

So I suspect that a more general solution would be to to teach these two programs to take notice of a new configuration variable you can set in the repository to limit the set of refs to give out. Then you do not have to introduce a new namespace,

Probably the configuration would be a glob pattern (for pathname like things, we tend to use shell glob, not regexp) to include/exclude. E.g.

	refs.expose = refs/heads/*
        refs.expose = refs/tags/*
        refs.expose = !refs/heads/*/*
        refs.expose = !refs/tags/v[0-9]*

would let you say "I would want to expose all of refs/heads/ (i.e. branches) and refs/tags (i.e. tags), but I do not want to show branches with '/' in their names, nor tags whose names do not begin with v[0-9]".