Hello, I'm one of the contributors of libgit2 (http://libgit2.github.com/). I'm currently working on the handling of refs and I'd like to get a better understanding of git symbolic references. In order to avoid polluting this list with an easy to answer noob question, I firsty asked this question on stackoverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/q/4986000). However, I do not have the feeling that I'm getting some definite "carved-in-stone" answers. This explains why I'm posting it here today. The following shell code correctly creates a chain of symbolic references git symbolic-ref "first" "refs/heads/master" git symbolic-ref "second" "first" git symbolic-ref "nested/third" "second" git symbolic-ref "refs/heads/fourth" "nested/third" And the following shell code correctly resolves the latest created symbolic reference to the tip of master. git show-ref "refs/heads/fourth" None of these use cases are described in the official documentation (git-symbolic-ref doc, git-show-ref doc). However, the following doesn't work git check-ref-format --print "first" So, my questions are: - Is it ok to store a symbolic reference within the refs/heads directory ? - Is it ok to chain symbolic references ? - As check-ref-format fails when being passed "first", does this mean that it's not recommended to create a symbolic reference at the same level than "HEAD"? Or maybe this command is not intended to deal with symbolic links ? My intent is to get a clear understanding of what is being supported and that I'm not working around anything or benefiting from a bug. Thanks in advance for any help you could provide me with. Cheers, Em. Em. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html