Re: [PATCH v4] Introduce %<branch> as shortcut to the tracked branch

On Fri, 20 Mar 2009, Jeff King wrote:

On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 11:02:33AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

A na?ve question.

Has nobody suggested to use a really illegal characters such as ':'
instead?  After all, we are not talking something that you can use in
refspecs but another way to spell branch names.

But if this goes into dwim_ref, then won't it be usable for refspecs? Or
even if it isn't, then imagine the user who doesn't know this and types

 git push :foo

unwittingly deleting the remote "foo".

Yes, that is unlikely (since why would they push the tracking branch of
foo?), but I don't think it makes sense to argue that it doesn't have
confusing (and potentially dangerous) consequenses.

quoted

Alternatively, '~master' may have a nice connotation that means "where
master calls its home".

I think that is quite clever and doesn't have any meaning for a revision
specifier already. I like it.

I considered suggesting this earlier, but didn't as the behaviour is not 
consistent.  If you have a user named master then you have to type 
'~master' (including quotes), if you don't you can type ~master, and you 
always have to type '~' instead of ~.  I didn't particularly fancy typing 
all those quotes, and certainly not explaining the behaviour to people not 
overly familiar with unix shell behaviour.

-- 
Julian

  ---
It's very inconvenient to be mortal -- you never know when everything may
suddenly stop happening.