Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes: > On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 07:45:46PM +0900, Junio C Hamano wrote: > >> > So I think the right endgame in the longer term is: >> > ... >> >> Here is to illustrate what I mean in a patch form. It resurrects >> the gentle setup, and uses a purely textual format check when we are >> outside the repository, while bypassing the @{magic} interpolation >> codepath that requires us to be in a repository. When we are in a >> repository, we operate the same way as before. > > I like the state this puts us in, but there's one catch: we're > completely changing the meaning of "check-ref-format --branch", aren't > we? > > It is going from "this is how you resolve @{-1}" to "this is how you > check the validity of a potential branch name". Do we need to pick a > different name, and/or have a deprecation period? That was not my intention. When used in a repository, it behaves exactly the same as before, including @{-1} resolution part. And by using strbuf_check_branch_ref(), it has always been checking the validity of a potential branch name, even though it wasn't advertised as such. The documentation needs to be updated, I would think. When used outside a repository, @{-1} would not have worked anyway, and @{-1} continues not to work, but the part that checks the validity should continue to work. At least that is what I wanted to happen in the patch.