On Thu, Dec 28, 2023 at 11:34:22AM +0100, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:

One interesting question is how we should treat files that look like a
pseudoref, but which really aren't. I'm not aware of any such files
written by Git itself, but it could certainly be that a user wrote such
a file into the repository manually. But given that we're adding new
behaviour that will be opt-in (e.g. via a new switch) I'd rather err on
the side of caution and mark any such file as broken instead of silently
ignoring them.

I probably wouldn't spend a ton of time worrying about this personally.
Without additional information, I think it's impossible for us to
determine a-priori whether or not a file underneath $GIT_DIR should be
interpreted as a pseudo-ref or not.

I agree with your reasoning that since this is opt-in via a new
command-line flag, that we're probably OK here enumerating the files in
$GIT_DIR, and printing out the ones that look like pseudo-refs.

Thanks,
Taylor