[PATCH v4 01/10] Documentation/glossary: redefine pseudorefs as special refs

Nowadays, Git knows about three different kinds of refs. As defined in gitglossary(7):

  - Regular refs that start with "refs/", like "refs/heads/main".

  - Pseudorefs, which live in the root directory. These must have
    all-caps names and must be a file that start with an object hash.
    Consequently, symbolic refs are not pseudorefs because they do not
    start with an object hash.

  - Special refs, of which we only have "FETCH_HEAD" and "MERGE_HEAD".

This state is extremely confusing, and I would claim that most folks don't fully understand what is what here. The current definitions also have several problems:

  - Where does "HEAD" fit in? It's not a pseudoref because it can be
    a symbolic ref. It's not a regular ref because it does not start
    with "refs/". And it's not a special ref, either.

  - There is a strong overlap between pseudorefs and special refs. The
    pseudoref section for example mentions "MERGE_HEAD", even though it
    is a special ref. Is it thus both a pseudoref and a special ref?

  - Why do we even need to distinguish refs that live in the root from
    other refs when they behave just like a regular ref anyway?

In other words, the current state is quite a mess and leads to wild inconsistencies without much of a good reason.

The original reason why pseudorefs were introduced is that there are some refs that sometimes behave like a ref, even though they aren't a ref. And we really only have two of these nowadays, namely "MERGE_HEAD" and "FETCH_HEAD". Those files are never written via the ref backends, but are instead written by git-fetch(1), git-pull(1) and git-merge(1). They contain additional metadata that highlights where a ref has been fetched from or the list of commits that have been merged.

This original intent in fact matches the definition of special refs that we have recently introduced in 8df4c5d205 (Documentation: add "special refs" to the glossary, 2024-01-19). Due to the introduction of the new reftable backend we were forced to distinguish those refs more clearly such that we don't ever try to read or write them via the reftable backend. In the same series, we also addressed all the other cases where we used to write those special refs via the filesystem directly, thus circumventing the ref backend, to instead write them via the backends. Consequently, there are no other refs left anymore which are special.

Let's address this mess and return the pseudoref terminology back to its original intent: a ref that sometimes behave like a ref, but which isn't really a ref because it gets written to the filesystem directly. Or in other words, let's redefine pseudorefs to match the current definition of special refs. As special refs and pseudorefs are now the same per definition, we can drop the "special refs" term again. It's not exposed to our users and thus they wouldn't ever encounter that term anyway.

Refs that live in the root of the ref hierarchy but which are not pseudorefs will be further defined in a subsequent commit.

Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
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 Documentation/glossary-content.txt | 40 +++++++++---------------------
 1 file changed, 12 insertions(+), 28 deletions(-)