Re: [PATCH] Disallow '\' in ref names

Andreas Ericsson schrieb:

Robin Rosenberg wrote:

quoted

This is asking for trouble since '\' is a directory separator in
Windows and thus may produce unpredictable results.

NAK. We allow / on unixy systems, and that's the path separator there.
Junio even makes extensive use of it to create per-contributor
namespaces for topic-branches.

Are you guessing this might be a problem in the future, or have you
actually run into it?

This is not possible on Windows:

$ git update-ref refs/heads/foo\bar HEAD
fatal: Unable to create '.git/refs/heads/foo\bar.lock': No such file or
directory

The problem is that git doesn't create the directory .git/refs/heads/foo
because the ref handling only mkdir()s directories that were split off
from the ref at forward-slashes.

The decision not to mangle command line arguments that are refs (on
Windows) was intentional. (We do mangle pathspec, i.e. we convert '\' to
'/'.) But back then I did not think about what should happen if a ref
contains a backslash.

BTW, it's the same problem with backslash in path components: Just don't
do that if you want to be cross-platfrom.

-- Hannes