On 24/04/30 02:26PM, Patrick Steinhardt wrote: > Nowadays, Git knows about three different kinds of refs. As defined in > gitglossary(7): > > - Regular refs that start with "refs/", like "refs/heads/main". > > - Pseudorefs, which live in the root directory. These must have > all-caps names and must be a file that start with an object hash. > Consequently, symbolic refs are not pseudorefs because they do not > start with an object hash. > > - Special refs, of which we only have "FETCH_HEAD" and "MERGE_HEAD". > > This state is extremely confusing, and I would claim that most folks > don't fully understand what is what here. The current definitions also > have several problems: > > - Where does "HEAD" fit in? It's not a pseudoref because it can be > a symbolic ref. It's not a regular ref because it does not start > with "refs/". And it's not a special ref, either. > > - There is a strong overlap between pseudorefs and special refs. The > pseudoref section for example mentions "MERGE_HEAD", even though it > is a special ref. Is it thus both a pseudoref and a special ref? > > - Why do we even need to distinguish refs that live in the root from > other refs when they behave just like a regular ref anyway? > > In other words, the current state is quite a mess and leads to wild > inconsistencies without much of a good reason. > > The original reason why pseudorefs were introduced is that there are > some refs that sometimes behave like a ref, even though they aren't a > ref. And we really only have two of these nowadads, namely "MERGE_HEAD" s/nowadads/nowadays/ -Justin
