Re: [PATCH v3 3/8] upload/receive-pack: allow hiding ref hierarchies

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 10:45:37AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Teach upload-pack and receive-pack to omit some refs from their
> initial advertisements by paying attention to the transfer.hiderefs
> multi-valued configuration variable.  Any ref that is under the
> hierarchies listed on the value of this variable is excluded from
> responses to requests made by "ls-remote", "fetch", "clone", "push",
> etc.
> 
> A typical use case may be
> 
> 	[transfer]
> 		hiderefs = refs/pull
> 
> to hide the refs that are internally used by the hosting site and
> should not be exposed over the network.

In the earlier review, I mentioned making this per-service, but I see
that is not the case here. Do you have an argument against doing so?

I'm specifically thinking of the way we do refs/pull at GitHub (which we
hide only from receive-pack).  I know that you think it would be cleaner
to hide those, and at some level I agree. But at the same time, the
current mechanism has been in place for some time; changing what we
present via upload-pack is likely to break people's workflows. And I
have not seen complaints about the current system. So unless there is a
compelling reason to do so, I'd rather let the fetcher make the
decision.

Gerrit's refs/changes may be a different story, if they have a large
enough number of them to make upload-pack's ref advertisement
overwhelming.

I'm happy to do the per-service patch on top, but I just expected it
here, so I'm wondering if you are against having the feature.

-Peff