RE: Creation of a branch named that has a directory prefix equal to the name of another branch fail.

From: Tommaso Ercole <tommaso.ercole@qlik.com>
Date: Jul 27, 2020, 08:21 UTC
Message-ID: <DM5PR1801MB20765394FC05BA6830475B7CF0720@DM5PR1801MB2076.namprd18.prod.outlook.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqv9ick5j4.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>

Hi all and thanks for the answers.

By my understanding it seems that you are aware of all the problems and you have just in place a solution for the future.

I will just wait for it.

Thank you really much for your effort, best regards, Tommaso Ercole

P.S. btw this chat is it private between us or published somewhere, I just thought about it now, when I saw my phone number on my signature...

-----Original Message-----
From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> 
Sent: venerdì 24 luglio 2020 22:44
To: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Cc: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>; Tommaso Ercole <Tommaso.Ercole@qlik.com>; git@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Creation of a branch named that has a directory prefix equal to the name of another branch fail.

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

> Note that even though packed-refs does not have this limitation, we 
> still enforce it in order to avoid headaches when moving between loose 
> and packed refs.
>
> Likewise, we'll probably[1] continue to enforce it with reftables, at 
> least for a while, to make things less confusing when pushing and 
> pulling between repositories with different storage.

Yup, that coincides with my understanding.

The files backend could also learn encoding/decoding refnames and that could be used to transition, if/when we decide to discard the "refs are organized in a directory-tree like fashion" design we have been using, to a new world order where a branch M and branches M/A, M/B, and M/C can co-exist.  Encoding/decoding refname to map to the filename would also help those on case insensitive filesystems.

Thanks to the recent preparation work for reftable, we are ensuring that we do not leave direct accesses to $GIT_DIR/refs/* in our codebase outside the files backend implementation, such a transition hopefully is getting much easier to do than before.