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On Mon, Aug 1, 2022 at 10:36 AM Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

No, sadly, that isn't the rule. See afe5d3d516 (symbolic ref: refuse
non-ref targets in HEAD, 2009-01-29) which tightened it to "refs/heads"
and then e9cc02f0e4 (symbolic-ref: allow refs/<whatever> in HEAD,
2009-02-13) which had to loosen it.

But it seems that at least this issue won't affect check_refname_format().

Hmm. Looking at that again - even without ALLOW_ONELEVEL I don't
actually think check_refname_format() requires "refs/" per se. So the
HEAD check isn't actually made redundant.

I wonder what the intended semantic meaning of ALLOW_ONELEVEL really
is supposed to be. It seems to really only require *one* slash - but
it doesn't really end up checking that it's in the "refs/" hierarchy,
it can be anywhere.

I guess the only thing it disallows is literally HEAD and MERGE_HEAD
and the like. But it's a bit odd, because it would seem to possibly
allow you to use "refs" that point to the objects/ directory or
similar.

Maybe the refs/ protection comes in somewhere later, I didn't really
go around to check.

                Linus