From: Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:26:44 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] refs.c: interpret @ as HEAD
Message-ID: <CACsJy8B3PpzidvAHado=y3ZromzROidmHh_OW9ZCOoFegzmQ3Q@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vehdsf19m.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 11:09 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> It's not hard to do. The below patch makes "." equivalent to HEAD and
>> ".U" -> "@{u}". Refs are not supposed to have '.' at the beginning, so
>> it's easy ...
>
> How is the equivalent of master..@{u} expressed?  master...U?  How is
> it disambiguated from a symmetric difference between master and U?
>
> There are reasons why some characters are forbidden from appearing
> at certain places in refname component. Anybody who designs a new
> syntax needs to think _why_.

I figured it had something to do with hidden filenames, not "..".
There's only one char left for ref alias, the leading forward slash.
But than opens another can of worms.. We could put still ref aliases
into the same ref namespace, with lower precedence that actual refs,
so no new syntax required.
--
Duy