Patrick Steinhardt [off-list ref] writes:
So any reference that contains additional data is not a proper ref and
thus should be warned about from my point of view. No Git tooling should
write them, so if something does it's a red flag to me.
If you find such a file in $GIT_DIR/refs/ hierarchy, because our
consumer side has been looser than necessary forever, and we never
have written such a file ourselves, it is a sign that a third-party
tool wrote it, and that the third-party tool used our reader
implementation as the specification. That is why I am hesitant to
retroactively tighten the rules like this patch does.
Thanks.