Re: reftable [v5]: new ref storage format

On Mon, Aug 07, 2017 at 07:41:43AM -0700, Shawn Pearce wrote:

quoted

As such if JGit wanted to use a longer key size, it is possible to implement
similar automatic builds and packaging into JGit.

I don't know if we need a larger key size. $DAY_JOB limits ref names
to ~200 bytes in a hook. I think GitHub does similar. But I'm worried
about the general masses who might be using our software and expect
ref names thus far to be as long as PATH_MAX on their system. Most
systems run PATH_MAX around 1024.

GitHub limits to 255 (for the fully-qualified name, so including
"refs/heads/"). I don't recall ever seeing any complaints about that,
though I suppose it's not out of the realm of possibility for somebody
with a multi-byte encoding to hit with a real name (it's configurable,
so I'm not sure if Enterprise customers in Asia might ever bump it).  I
do think something like 1024 would be well into "you're insane if you
really want to name your branch this" territory.

-Peff