On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 04:19:54PM -0800, Brandon Williams wrote:

quoted

We always have the ability to extend the patterns accepted via a feature
(or capability) to ls-refs, so maybe the best thing to do now would only
support a few patterns with specific semantics.  Something like if you
say "master" only match against refs/heads/ and refs/tags/ and if you
want something else you would need to specify "refs/pull/master"?

That way we could only support globs at the end "master*" where * can
match anything (including slashes)

After some in-office discussion it seems like the best thing to do for
this (right now since if we change our mind we can just introduce a
capability which extends the patterns supported) would be to left-anchor
the ref-patterns and only allow for a single wildcard character '*'
which matches zero or more characters (and doesn't care about slashes
'/').  This wildcard character should only be supported at the end of
the ref pattern.  This means that if a client wants 'master' then they
would need to specify 'refs/heads/master' (and the other
ref_rev_parse_rules expansions) as a ref pattern. But they could say
"refs/heads/*" for all refs under refs/heads.

Heh, I just responded without having read this and came up with the same
suggestion.

So I agree that is the right path. Or the simplification I mentioned
that "refs/heads/master" would return that ref or possibly
"refs/heads/master/foo" if it exists. Remember that it's fine to be
overly broad here. This is purely an optimization in the advertisement,
as we'd still pick out the refs we care about in a separate step.

-Peff