Re: Malformed branch name in fast-export when specifying non-HEAD/branch revision

> On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 03:30:14PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> You can think of "fast-export" an off-line "push" command [*1*]; instead
>> of giving a random commit object, e.g. "git fast-export HEAD~1", that can
>> not be used as a ref, you can use the refspec notation to tell where the
>> result should go, e.g. "git fast-export HEAD~1:refs/heads/a-bit-older",
>> from the command line of fast-export.
>>
>> I suspect that also may clarify what Sverre was trying to do in his recent
>> series. The root cause of both this and the issue Sverre wanted to fix is
>> the design mistake of fast-export that tries to reuse the notation of
>> object range specification for a different purpose of telling which "ref"
>> to update, I think.
>
> Yes, this was the conclusion I came to when I looked at this a month or
> so ago. You really need to give fast-export a mapping of objects to
> refnames, and it should output ref names _only_ for the mapping. That
> would handle this "not a ref" case, but would also let you push
> "refs/heads/foo" when it is equivalent to "refs/heads/master", without
> fast-export mentioning "refs/heads/master" at all.