On Tue, Apr 02, 2024 at 09:40:41AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im> writes:
> 
> > because they have been supported by Git all along. It simply makes our
> > lifes easier when we don't have to special-case creations and deletions
> > in any way.
> >
> > So I'd really not want those to go away or become deprecated.
> 
> That is a good input.
> 
> Do you have anything to add as a counter-proposal?  The "I do not
> care what was there before" update mode does make it necessary to
> have a "zero" value for symrefs that can be distinguishable from
> not having a value at all.
> 
> Thanks.

Sorry for taking this long to answer your question.

I might have missed it while scanning through this thread, but why
exactly is the zero OID not a good enough placeholder here to say that
the ref must not exist? A symref cannot point to a ref named after the
zero OID anyway.

In my opinion, "update-symref" with an old-value must be able to accept
both object IDs and symrefs as old value. Like this it would be possible
to update a proper ref to a symref in a race-free way. So you can say:

    git update-ref SYMREF refs/heads/main 19981daefd7c147444462739375462b49412ce33

To update "SYRMEF" to "refs/heads/main", but only in case it currently
is a proper ref that points to 19981daefd7c147444462739375462b49412ce33.
Similarly...

    git update-ref SYMREF refs/heads/main refs/heads/master

would update "SYMREF" to "refs/heads/main", but only if it currently
points to the symref "refs/heads/master". And by extension I think that
the zero OID should retain its established meaning of "This ref must not
exist":

    git update-ref SYMREF refs/heads/main 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000

This would only update "SYMREF" to "refs/heads/main" if it does not yet
exist.

Patrick