Re: [PATCH] Do not ignore hidden refs

[Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz>]

On Sun, Nov 19, 2006 at 01:29:27AM CET, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> My understanding of your original plan was to use ".foo" as
> a private thing for Cogito to use to implement some cleverness
> when the user talks about the branch "foo" (just like StGIT
> uses "refs/bases/foo" to keep track of its private stuff related
> to user branch "foo").  When the user says "my 'foo' branch",
> you were going to munge that name into ".foo" and use both to
> implement that cleverness (just like StGIT uses "refs/bases/foo"
> in addition to "refs/heads/foo" when the user is talking about
> his branch "foo").

(Not a plan, that's what I do now. ;-)

Yes, that's correct, but it's not what I'm talking about anymore - sorry
for the confusion. The proper solution for this is of course to move
this around in the refs/ hierarchy out of heads to a more suitable
place. I'm going to do that in few moments.

What I'm talking about now are _real_ user-visible and user-created
refs, which should however stay local to the repository the user created
them in.

> I would rather think that it would actively be a bad thing to
> make the core level to consider heads/private/foo and heads/foo
> ambiguous.  When the user says "my 'foo' branch" that should
> mean the "foo" branch not the "private/foo" branch.
> 
> Which certainly suggests that heads/private/, as a user visible
> convention to keep developer-repository private stuff for local
> use, is too verbose.

I don't think the automatic lookup of the branch with private/ prepended
is too bad a thing, but if you have a better solution...

> StGIT's use of refs/bases (i.e. outside refs/heads) is probably
> sensible because it is not something the end user should
> directly muck with nor check out.  If Porcelains want some
> "special branch" for their own use to do their magic, however,
> the ref cannot be outside refs/heads for it to be pointed at by
> HEAD to become the "current branch" ("bisect" command comes to
> mind, and I suspect "cg-seek" would have similar issues).  But
> that kind of use is all under controll of the Porcelain, and I
> would imagine "too long to type" objection would not apply.

Yes, but what I have on mind are branches the _user_ wants to declare as
local.

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
The meaning of Stonehenge in Traflamadorian, when viewed from above, is:
"Replacement part being rushed with all possible speed."