Re: [PATCH 00/30] [RFC] extensions.refFormat and packed-refs v2 file format

[Sean Allred <allred.sean@gmail.com>]

Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanwen@google.com> writes:
> To be honest, I don't understand why symrefs are such a generic
> concept; I've only ever seen them used for HEAD.

I've been only lurking in this thread (and loosely following along,
even!) but I do want to call out that I have recently considered perhaps
abusing symrefs to point to normal feature branches. In our workflow, we
have documentation records identified by a numeric ID -- the code
changes corresponding to that documentation (testing instructions, etc.)
use formulaic branch names like `feature/123456`.

It is sometimes beneficial for two or more of these documentation
records to perform their work on the same code branch. There are myriad
reasons for this, some better than others, but I want to avoid getting
mired in whether or not this is a good idea. It does happen and is
sometimes even the best way to do it.

In these scenarios, I've considered having `feature/2` be a symref to
`feature/1` so that both features can always 'know' what to call their
branch for operations like checkout. I've done this on a smaller scale
in the past to great effect.

Nothing is set in stone here for us, but I did want to call this out as
a potential real-world use case.

--
Sean Allred