On Fri, 20 Mar 2009, Junio C Hamano wrote:
An most obvious one is that "git checkout branchname" and "git checkout
refs/heads/branchname" behave differently. You cannot checkout a branch
called %master after this patch goes in.
Just be honest and say "You may have a branch whose name begins with a '%'
and you cannot refer to it anymore in certain contexts. Too bad. Don't
do it next time you create a new branch". I _can_ buy that argument.
It however asks for a sane escape hatch. You cannot "fix" such branch
names in most obvious ways (if you could, that would be a bug in this %
feature).
(1) git branch -m %master percent-master
We would end up renaming what master tracks to new name.
(2) git branch percent-master refs/heads/%master; git branch -d %master
The first part is a good try, but the latter deletes what master
tracks.
How about adding a generic escape hatch, that would cover this and
future extensions?
Let a ref that starts with a single quote be taken as given and not
processed. You have to escape it to get it past the shell, but that makes
it rather unlikely that anyone has used a name that starts with a quote -
and if they have you can still use this mechanism to rename it.
So now (1) above could be written:
git branch -m "'%master" percent-master
and other commands, such as
git branch -d "'%master"
or
git checkout "'%master"
would also do the right thing (i.e. use refs/heads/%master as a branch).
--
Julian
---
Stewie Griffin: [looking in the fridge for a drink] Soda... purple stuff... Sunny D, all right!
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