I'm digging this topic up from the ground because if it was fixed, I would not have spent many confusing (and a little bit panicking) minutes wondering how the hell I managed to push to "origin/master" which I did not have push access to begin with, which turned out to be the local branch, refs/heads/origin/master, not the remote branch refs/remotes/origin/master. Summary until this point in the old thread, you can accidentally do "git branch refs/heads/next", which happily creates refs/heads/refs/heads/next. If you also have refs/heads/next, things can get confusing for commands that accepts both branch and non-branch refs. There were some more discussion about unambiguously specifying full ref in git-branch but it was getting nowhere. On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 2:03 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Duy Nguyen <pclouds@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> Prevent is a strong word. I meant we only do it if they force >> it. Something like this.. >> >> -- 8< -- >> diff --git a/branch.c b/branch.c >> index 723a36b..3f0540f 100644 >> --- a/branch.c >> +++ b/branch.c >> @@ -251,6 +251,11 @@ void create_branch(const char *head, >> forcing = 1; >> } >> >> + if (!force && dwim_ref(name, strlen(name), sha1, &real_ref)) >> + die(_("creating ref refs/heads/%s makes %s ambiguous.\n" >> + "Use -f to create it anyway."), >> + name, name); > > Does this check still allow you to create a branch "refs/heads/next" > and then later create a branch "next"? The latter will introduce an > ambiguity without any prevention, even though the prevention would > trigger if the order in which these two branches are created is > swapped--- the end result has ambiguity but the safety covers only > one avenue to the confusing situation. It could be fixed by checking all existing refs if any of them becomes ambiguous after refs/heads/next comes to life. We can filter and check only branch that shares the same base name (or starts with "refs/", "heads/", "tags/" or "remotes/"), so it's still expensive but not as much as checking all refs. Even with covering only one avenue, it would definitely help my case (refs/remotes/origin/master exists and refs/heads/origin/master asked to be created). Also in my case, if refs/heads/origin/master already exists then I think I should reject creating refs/remotes/origin/master, or warn loudly. Sounds promising enough to start making patches? > And the only way I can think of to avoid that kind of confusion is > to forbid creation of a subset of possible names by reserving a set > of known (but arbitrary) prefixes---which I am not sure is a good > way to go. At least not yet. -- Duy -- 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