Re: [PATCH] Do not ignore hidden refs

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Nov 18, 2006, 07:27 UTC
Message-ID: <7vzmapdxki.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <20061118045323.GK7201@pasky.or.cz>

Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz> writes:

> I don't *need* but it might be nice to have also private heads, for
> possible setups when you declare heads namespace of two repositories
> matching 1:1 but would like to temporarily make a short-lived head in
> one of them or so.

I agree that different classes of heads and tags (not just "public" vs "private") may come in handy in different workflows.

I think, however, if we (collectively as all the Porcelain writers although I am not really one of them) are to support it, they should not make distinction to the core, and it should be handled with the agreed-upon convention. In other words, if ".bar" were a valid refname to the core then I would agree that not packing them had definitely been a bug.

And we already have one such convention of using refs/remotes for tracking branches, which is promoted to become the default (thus an official BCP).

Personally I established a convention to treat heads/??/* as "private namespace" while using heads/* as public refs for my own work (I do that for git.git as people know, and I do that for my day job project as well). I do not think it is a great enough convention to be promoted as the official BCP, but it has been good enough for me, especially commands like "show-branch" and "tag -l" understands the shell-style filegrobs (e.g "show-branch master heads/??/*" would show what's yet to be polished and merged).