On Tue, 2015-06-23 at 15:53 -0400, David Turner wrote: > > * Regarding MERGE_HEAD: you take the point of view that it must continue > > to be stored as a file. And yet it must also behave somewhat like a > > reference; for example, `git rev-parse MERGE_HEAD` works today. > > MERGE_HEAD is also used for reachability, right? > > > > Another point of view is that MERGE_HEAD is a plain old boring > > reference, but there is some other metadata related to it that the refs > > backend has to store. The file-based backend would have special-case > > code to read the additional data from the tail of the loose refs file > > (and be sure to write the metadata when writing the reference), but > > other backends could store the reference with the rest but do their own > > thing with the metadata. So I guess I'm wondering whether the refs API > > needs a MERGE_HEAD-specific way to read and write MERGE_HEAD along with > > its metadata. > > You are probably right that this is a good idea. On reflection, I think it might make sense to keep MERGE_HEAD as a file. The problem is that not only would refs backends have to add new MERGE_HEAD-handling functions, but we would also need new plumbing commands to allow scripts to access the complete contents of MERGE_HEAD. That seems more complicated to me. -- 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