Re: ref name troubles, was Re: [PATCH v2] Introduce %<branch> as shortcut to the tracked branch

On Fri, 20 Mar 2009, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Petr Baudis [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

quoted

"git branch" I agree with, but not "git update-ref".  As plumbing, the 
latter should be much more allowing, feeding rope aplenty (but also 
allowing cool tricks we do not think about yet).

We shouldn't allow creating insane ref names even with update-ref. That
way porcelains cannot rely on update-ref to sanity check the user's
crap. At most, maybe you might want to bypass this check with some force
switch, though I really can't quite imagine why.

That's all nice and clean in theory, but it was more or less the same
reasoning as what was behind the tightening not to allow anything but
refs/heads pointed by HEAD, but you know what fell out of it.  "Insane"
and "crap" are in the eye of the beholder.

I think there's no possible use to being able to use update-ref to create 
a ref that rev-parse can't be made to read. I think people will want to do 
all sorts of things that are insane (I'd personally like some refs with 
the basename "..."), but they're only likely to do insane things that 
happen to work, rather than insane things that aren't prevented but still 
don't work.

	-Daniel
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