Re: What's the definition of a valid Git symbolic reference?

From: Emeric Fermas <emeric.fermas@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 15, 2011, 03:49 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTi=FKXqu_psoT+gvyq2c_o8Mej+DgpccecOpQd8H@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <F624322D-359A-48ED-A241-622042F77CDA@sb.org>

Thanks a lot for this answer.

I've also read the man page of check-ref-format. However, there may be some not up-to-date documentation or some "non guarded against" command usage in git.

This explains the second part of my question ("Or maybe this command (ie. check-ref-format) is not intended to deal with symbolic links ?").

Another possibility would be that only git internal symbolic references are allowed to live under the ".git" dir (HEAD, FETCH_HEAD, ...) and that user defined symrefs should live under refs/. In this case, maybe "git symbolic-ref" should also prevent the user from creating a reference which doesn't contains a forward slash.

Once again, by reading at the code I can understand how those commands currently work. What I'm trying to achieve is to understand what should be their recommended usage.

Of course, I'll be glad to contribute any code/doc patch once the "voice of the git community" has spoken :-)

Em.

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 4:19 AM, Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org> wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> On Feb 14, 2011, at 12:58 PM, Emeric Fermas wrote:
>
>> - As check-ref-format fails when being passed "first", does this mean
>> that it's not recommended to create a symbolic reference at the same
>> level than "HEAD"? Or maybe this command is not intended to deal with
>> symbolic links ?
>
> I don't know about the rest of your question, but check-ref-format
> explicitly states in the manpage that the refname must have at least
> one /, to enforce the presence of a category (such as heads/) in the
> refname.
>
> -Kevin Ballard
>