Re: [PATCH] symbolic ref: refuse non-ref targets in HEAD

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> I know that using symbolic-ref manually is rare, but both I and the
> original poster have been bitten by this (and figuring out what is going
> on and fixing it is quite painful). But most importantly, I don't think
> this can possibly hurt anyone trying to use this legitimately, since the
> exact thing it is protecting against corrupts your repo. :)

I generally do not like adding artificial limitation to plumbing like this
patch does, because the end user making silly mistake using plumbing is a
sign that there was something lacking in the Porcelain.

But for this particular case, I do not think any future usage of
symbolic-ref plubming will get inconvenienced with the change.  I would
even suggest making the check tighter to insist on refs/heads/ (not just
refs/) and tighten validate_headref() in path.c to match.

> Please beware that running the test script on the current "master" will
> actually hose your git repo (test 3 kills the trash directory's
> .git/HEAD, which means test 4 thinks your parent .git/ is its current
> repo). Maybe it makes sense to do a precautionary reset in between.

In addition, perhaps it may make sense to use test_create_repo to go one
level deeper before starting to play around, so that trash directory's
repository will prevent you from going any further up.