Re: Malformed branch name in fast-export when specifying non-HEAD/branch revision

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 03:30:14PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> You can think of "fast-export" an off-line "push" command [*1*]; instead
> of giving a random commit object, e.g. "git fast-export HEAD~1", that can
> not be used as a ref, you can use the refspec notation to tell where the
> result should go, e.g. "git fast-export HEAD~1:refs/heads/a-bit-older",
> from the command line of fast-export.
> 
> I suspect that also may clarify what Sverre was trying to do in his recent
> series. The root cause of both this and the issue Sverre wanted to fix is
> the design mistake of fast-export that tries to reuse the notation of
> object range specification for a different purpose of telling which "ref"
> to update, I think.

Yes, this was the conclusion I came to when I looked at this a month or
so ago. You really need to give fast-export a mapping of objects to
refnames, and it should output ref names _only_ for the mapping. That
would handle this "not a ref" case, but would also let you push
"refs/heads/foo" when it is equivalent to "refs/heads/master", without
fast-export mentioning "refs/heads/master" at all.

-Peff