On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 1:11 PM, Michael Haggerty <mhagger@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 08/20/2014 09:45 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote: >> Michael Haggerty <mhagger@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: >> >>> I think we can get away with not including broken refnames when >>> iterating. After all, the main goal of tolerating them is to let them >>> be deleted, right? >> >> Or read from a ref whose name has retroactively made invalid, in >> order to create a similar but validly named ref to serve as its >> replacement? So at least we need to give the users some way of >> reading from them, in addition to deleting them, no? > > The die() error message would presumably include the name of the invalid > reference. > > If we change the rules for reference names and a bunch of names become > invalid, then it would admittedly be cumbersome to run git N times to > find the N invalid names. But if we change the rules, then *at that > time* we could always build in iteration over broken reference names. > > It's not that I have something against building it iteration over broken > reference names now, as long as it is clearly segregated from "normal" > iteration to prevent illegal names from getting loose in the code. We already have iterators that show also bad refs. For example, git branch uses DO_FOR_EACH_INCLUDE_BROKEN which is a flag to include also broken refs that can not be resolved which allows them to be listed : $ echo "this is not a valid sha1" >.git/refs/heads/broken $ git branch broken foo * master $ git branch -D broken error: branch 'broken' not found. (allowing -D to remove it is in a different patch further down my series) Since we already display broken/unresolvable refs, I think the most consistent path is to also allow showing the refs broken/illegal-names too in the list. (when DO_FOR_EACH_INCLUDE_BROKEN is specified) Of course, an end user could fix this by deleting the file but since it is easy to add the special casing to 'git branch -D' to handle this case I think this would be more userfriendly since then the user can use git branch -D regardless of the reason why the ref is broken. Ronnie -- 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