Re: [PATCHv2 04/10] remote: Reject remote names containing '/'

Johan Herland [off-list ref] writes:

Although we definitely support and encourage use of multi-level branch
names, we have never conciously tried to give support for multi-level
remote names. Currently, they are allowed, but there is no evidence that
they are commonly used.

Now, they do provide a source of problems when trying to expand the
"$nick/$name" shorthand notation (where $nick matches a remote name)
into a full refname. Consider the shorthand "foo/bar/baz": Does this
parse as $nick = foo, $name = bar/baz, or $nick = foo/bar, $name = baz?

Since we need to be unambiguous about these things, we hereby declare
that a remote name shall never contain a '/' character, and that the
only correct way to parse "foo/bar/baz" is $nick = foo, $name = bar/baz.

I know I am guilty of hinting to go in this direction in the earlier
discussion, but I have to wonder how much more refactoring is needed
to see if there is only one unique possibility among many.

For a string with N slashes, you have only N possible ways to split
it into $nick and $name, and if you see a ref "bar/baz" copied from
remote "foo" but no ref "baz" copied from remote "foo/bar" (or you
may not even have a remote "foo/bar" in the first place), the user
is already very unambiguous. The declaration is merely being lazy.

I am not saying we must implement such a back-track to disambiguate
the user input better.  I am wondering how much more effort on top
of this series is needed if we want to get there (provided that the
disambiguation is a good thing to do in the first place).