Re: [PATCH] HEAD, ORIG_HEAD and FETCH_HEAD are really special.

[Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>]

On Fri, 7 Sep 2007, Keith Packard wrote:

> On Fri, 2007-09-07 at 04:21 -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> 
> > This patch brings in a new world order by introducing a backward
> > incompatible change.  When the string the user gave us does not
> > contain any slash, we do not apply the first entry (i.e.
> > directly underneath .git/ without any "refs/***") unless the
> > name consists solely of uppercase letters or an underscore,
> > thereby ignoring .git/master.  The ones we often use, such as
> > HEAD and ORIG_HEAD are not affected by this change.
> 
> It seems to me that instead of introducing an incompatible (but probably
> useful) change, a sensible option would be to have the ambiguous
> reference be an error instead of a warning. One shouldn't be encouraged
> to use names in .git that conflict with stuff in refs/heads anyway.

I agree.  IMHO the sensible thing to do is to always warn, and error out 
by default.  I see no advantage for core.warnAmbiguousRefs=false other 
than allow the user to shoot himself in the foot someday.  Instead, we 
should have core.allowAmbiguousRefs set to off by default.


Nicolas