Re: "git symbolic-ref" doesn't do a very good job

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 30, 2022, 20:38 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqtu6y1gky.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <CAHk-=wg9LaHeg0UmZ90gLOaBpO-5fhoaH22iNNm=1eror95pFg@mail.gmail.com>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> t3200-branch.sh does
>
>       git symbolic-ref refs/heads/dangling-symref nowhere
>
> which really depends on that whole "git symbolic-ref does no sanity
> checking at all".

Yeah, once in the past, I thought

    git symbolic-ref refs/heads/main master

might be a way to adjust to the new world order without having me to change my workflow. I can always update master, and main follows it without me being aware of it even being there.

But it did not work.  Even worse, after doing so, running

    git update-ref refs/heads/main master

created ".git/master", which was a disaster.  Of course

    git symbolic-ref refs/heads/main refs/heads/master

would have worked.

I am not sure what workflow the "nowhere" thing is supposed to help. Of course, with s/nowhere/HEAD/, it is a perfectly sane repository immediately after "git init -b nowhere", so whatever tightening we do, we should make sure that

    git symbolic-ref refs/heads/main HEAD

keeps working.