Hi Peff

On 31/10/2019 20:07, Jeff King wrote:

On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 07:53:18PM +0000, Phillip Wood wrote:
[...]

quoted

I'd love to see a consensus around putting remote versions of refs/foo under
refs/remote/<remote-name>/foo. To share notes I add a refspec that fetches
to refs/remote/<remote-name>/notes. It is a pain that 'git pull' wont merge
them for me though.

The trouble with that sort of scheme is that it conflicts with the
current namespace scheme, which puts the remote "notes" branch in
"refs/remotes/<remote-name>/notes". And it's not just a problem if you
want to have a branch called "notes". Think about what "git fetch
--prune" would do.

I was suggesting a convention of using refs/remote/ not refs/remotes/ 
for tracking remote refs that are not branches to avoid that problem. 
It's not ideal to have remote branches under a different namespace to 
all the other remote refs but it does avoid breaking current setups. I 
haven't thought it through but perhaps in the long run we could migrate 
remote branches to refs/remote/<remote-name>/heads/ and treat 
refs/remotes/<remote-name>/ as an alias for 
refs/remote/<remote-name>/heads/. As you say below we'd need to think 
about how to use remote tags as well.

I do think the world would be a better place if we mapped (all or a
subset of) the remote "refs/" into "refs/remotes/<remote-name>/". I.e.,
really creating "refs/remotes/origin/heads" and even
"refs/remotes/origin/tags". But we'd need to re-adjust the way that some
ref lookups work (e.g., looking in refs/remotes/*/tags for tags).

There was some work by Johan Herland around the v1.8 time-frame, but it
stalled:

   https://public-inbox.org/git/AANLkTi=yFwOAQMHhvLsB1_xmYOE9HHP2YB4H4TQzwwc8@mail.gmail.com/

And here's some later discussion:

   https://public-inbox.org/git/CA+P7+xpj+8DZ=K0pna299Mu3nsQ4+JV_JUK=WFzzAFnJN+Bkbg@mail.gmail.com/

So in short, I agree very much with the direction you're discussing, but
I think there's some fundamental work that needs done first.

Thanks for the links, I'll have a read through them.

Best Wishes

Phillip

-Peff