From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Subject: Re: Buggy handling of non-canonical ref names
Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:40:24 -0700
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To: Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>
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In-Reply-To: <4E551D70.9080509@alum.mit.edu> (Michael Haggerty's message of
 "Wed, 24 Aug 2011 17:49:04 +0200")
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Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> writes:

> What is the policy about reference names and their canonicalization?

The overall policy has been that we care about well-formed input, and
everything else is "undefined", even though as you found out some of them
try to work sensibly.

>     $ git check-ref-format /foo/bar ; echo $?
>     0
>
>     $ git check-ref-format --print /foo/bar
>     /foo/bar

I think these are bogus. Patches welcome.

> However, creating a reference with such a name is equivalent to creating
> a reference without the leading slash:
>
>     $ git update-ref /foo/bar HEAD
>     $ cat .git/foo/bar
>     ef6cf90ba11dd6205f8b974692d795ea0b1c0bdd
>     $ git branch /bar/baz
>     $ git for-each-ref | grep baz
>     ef6cf90ba11dd6205f8b974692d795ea0b1c0bdd commit refs/heads/bar/baz

These are just examples of "undefined being nice to the user as a bonus".