Re: [PATCH] Disable USE_SYMLINK_HEAD by default

[Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>]

Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org> writes:

> On Tue, 2005-11-15 at 13:18 +0100, Petr Baudis wrote:
>>
>> I'm ambivalent here. I would like to have just a single behaviour here,
>> since the symbolic ref otherwise really does not get much testing. But I
>> can also understand that we are breaking tools here.
>> 
>> Still, for the reason above, I think we should aim at the symbolic refs
>> being the canonical format in the next major release after 1.0, giving
>> users time to fix their tools. I can see no advantage in symlinks except
>> the backwards compatibility...

The voice of reason comes from Pasky; I agree with this.

> I planned to write about symrefs long ago, and probably I waited for too
> long.  I still hope it will be the default for 1.0 release, but if not,
> I hope the next release won't be too far away.

I think it is a bit too late for that, but please keep that
patch; I'll hold on to it too.

>> > On the other hand, I think it would be useful to be able to configure the 
>> > behaviour via .git/config.
>> 
>> Yes, I would very much like to have this.

I am in favor of that.  Something like this, perhaps:

	core.filemode = 1 # trustworthy
        core.usesymlink = 0 # new style 

> Agreed.  By the way, the symref doesn't need to be called HEAD - it
> could be "trunk" or "main" or "default-branch".

Actually, I was thinking about changing get_sha1_basic() in
sha1_name.c so that refs immediately under ${GIT_DIR-.git} are
restricted to uppercase only.  The other day I did

	$ git-update-ref linus blah

which created .git/linus in addition to .git/refs/heads/linus;
this gives you considerable confusion.