Re: [PATCH 00/30] [RFC] extensions.refFormat and packed-refs v2 file format

Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanwen@google.com> writes:

I've been only lurking in this thread (and loosely following along, even!) but I do want to call out that I have recently considered perhaps abusing symrefs to point to normal feature branches. In our workflow, we have documentation records identified by a numeric ID -- the code changes corresponding to that documentation (testing instructions, etc.) use formulaic branch names like `feature/123456`.

It is sometimes beneficial for two or more of these documentation records to perform their work on the same code branch. There are myriad reasons for this, some better than others, but I want to avoid getting mired in whether or not this is a good idea. It does happen and is sometimes even the best way to do it.

In these scenarios, I've considered having `feature/2` be a symref to `feature/1` so that both features can always 'know' what to call their branch for operations like checkout. I've done this on a smaller scale in the past to great effect.

Nothing is set in stone here for us, but I did want to call this out as a potential real-world use case.

-- Sean Allred