Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes: > Making "refs" a file instead of a directory does work nicely, as any > attempts to read or write would get ENOTDIR. And we can fool > is_git_directory() as long as it's marked executable. That's OK on POSIX > systems, but I'm not sure how it would work on Windows (or maybe it > would work just fine, since we presumably just say "yep, everything is > executable"). > > So perhaps that's enough, and what we put in HEAD won't matter (since > nobody will be able to write into refs/ anyway). I wonder if it would help to take the "looser repository detection" code alone and have it in a release, way before the rest of the reftable topic is ready. Then by the time a repository created by a reftable-enabled Git appears on people's disks, all the older versions of Git that are still in people's hands would at least know that it is a repository supported by future Git that they themselves do not know how to handle, stop repository discovery correctly and refrain from damaging the repository with an extension unknown to them?
