Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 01:01:42PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

quoted

Junio, I think we should probably revert b229d18 (and loosen
symbolic-ref's check to just "refs/"). Even if you want to argue that
topgit should be changed to handle this differently, we are still
breaking existing topgit installations, and who knows what other scripts
which might have relied on doing something like this.

I'm Ok with the revert (and I agree it is absolutely the right thing to do
at least for the short term).

It looks like you have already pushed out the revert. But I think we
need this on top to make topgit work correctly.

-- >8 --
Subject: [PATCH] symbolic-ref: allow refs/<whatever> in HEAD

Commit afe5d3d5 introduced a safety valve to symbolic-ref to
disallow installing an invalid HEAD. It was accompanied by
b229d18a, which changed validate_headref to require that
HEAD contain a pointer to refs/heads/ instead of just refs/.
Therefore, the safety valve also checked for refs/heads/.

As it turns out, topgit is using refs/top-bases/ in HEAD,
leading us to re-loosen (at least temporarily) the
validate_headref check made in b229d18a. This patch does the
corresponding loosening for the symbolic-ref safety valve,
so that the two are in agreement once more.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <redacted>

Actually we should simply revert afe5d3d5 altogether with the above
message, as it introduced a test that expects the tightened behaviour.