On Thu, Aug 22, 2024 at 09:17:08AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > Patrick Steinhardt <ps@xxxxxx> writes: > > > >> So any reference that contains additional data is not a proper ref and > >> thus should be warned about from my point of view. No Git tooling should > >> write them, so if something does it's a red flag to me. > > > > If you find such a file in $GIT_DIR/refs/ hierarchy, because our > > consumer side has been looser than necessary forever, and we never > > have written such a file ourselves, it is a sign that a third-party > > tool wrote it, and that the third-party tool used our reader > > implementation as the specification. That is why I am hesitant to > > retroactively tighten the rules like this patch does. > > I forgot to add my recommended course of action, without which a > review is worth much less X-<. > > I am OK if we tightened the rules retroactively, as long as it > starts as a probing check (i.e. "info: we found an unusual thing > in the wild. Please report this to us so that we can ask you for > more details like how such a ref that would violate a rule that was > retroactively tightened got there", not "error: malformed ref"). Okay, that makes sense. The fsck infrastructure does have info message types, so this should certainly be doable. I'd argue that we might want to make this an `FSCK_WARN`, but I'm also fine with iteratively bumping up the severity from INFO to WARN to ERROR when we don't observe any complaints about this tightening. Patrick
