On Tue, Apr 30, 2024 at 05:07:19AM -0700, Karthik Nayak wrote: > Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes: > > > On Tue, Apr 30, 2024 at 09:30:05AM +0200, Patrick Steinhardt wrote: [snip] > >> > Are there any practical implications of the changes in this patch for users > >> > running commands like "git log FETCH_HEAD" (I can't think of any off the top > >> > of my head but it would be good to have some reassurance on that point in > >> > the commit message) > >> > >> Not really, no. We have never been doing a good job at enforcing the > >> difference between pseudo refs or normal refs anyway. Pseudo refs can be > >> symrefs just fine, and our tooling won't complain. The only exception > >> where I want us to become stricter is in how we enforce the syntax rules > >> for root refs (which is handled by Peff in a separate patch series), and > >> that we start to not treat FETCH_HEAD and MERGE_HEAD as proper refs. > >> They should still resolve when you ask git-rev-parse(1), but when you > >> iterate through refs they should not be surfaced as they _aren't_ refs. > > > > I actually would not even mind if they are surfaced when iterating with > > --include-root-refs. But then I am a little skeptical of the purpose of > > that feature in the first place. After all, the reason code shoves stuff > > into .git/FOO_HEAD is precisely because we don't want other stuff > > iterating over them, using them for reachability, and so on. That is why > > "--all" does not include them, for example. > > > > But I did not follow the development of the feature, so maybe I am > > missing some cool use case. > > > > The use case was to allow us to look at these refs when working with > the reftable backend. Currently there is no way to do that, with the > files backend, well you could just read the files. So mostly a debugging > usecase. That's true for normal root refs, only, though. The pseudorefs (current special refs) can still be surfaced even if the for-each-ref machinery doesn't surface them because by definition, they always live in the filesystem. Patrick
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