Re: [PATCH 2/2] ref-filter: support filtering of operational refs

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Dec 21, 2023, 20:40 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqzfy3l270.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <20231221170715.110565-3-karthik.188@gmail.com>

Karthik Nayak <karthik.188@gmail.com> writes:

> With the upcoming introduction of the reftable backend, it becomes ever
> so important to provide the necessary tooling for printing all refs
> associated with a repository.

We have pseudoref (those all caps files outside the refs/ hierarchy) as an official term defined in the glossary, and Patrick's reftable work based on Han-Wen's work revealed the need to treat FETCH_HEAD and MERGE_HEAD as "even more pecurilar than pseudorefs" that need different term (tentatively called "special refs"). Please avoid coming up with yet another random name "operational" without discussing.

With a quick look at the table in this patch, "pseudorefs" appears to be the closest word that people are already familiar with, I think. A lot more reasonable thing to do may be to scan the $GIT_DIR for files whose name satisfy refs.c:is_pseudoref_syntax() and list them, instead of having a hardcoded list of these special refs. In addition, when reftable and other backends that can natively store things outside refs/ hierarchy is in use, they ought to know what they have so enumerating these would not be an issue for them without having such a hardcoded table of names.