Re: push fails with unexpected 'matches more than one'

From: Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de>
To: Git Mailing List <git@vger.kernel.org>
Cc: "Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org>
Subject: Re: push fails with unexpected 'matches more than one'
Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2007 18:51:58 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CC1A592A-443B-4039-9FA4-2386066C22AD@zib.de> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20071013032100.GK27899@spearce.org>

On Oct 13, 2007, at 5:21 AM, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:

> Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de> wrote:
>> I read carefully through the documentation of git-send-pack and
>> git-rev-parse. The current implementation of git-send-pack is in line
>> with the documented behaviour, as is the implementation of git-rev-
>> parse.
>>
>> So formally everything is correct.
>>
>> But it is completely against my expectation that git-push <remote>
>> <head>
>> can successfully resolve a <head> that git-rev-parse fails to  
>> parse. I
>> understand that refs are not revs ;). But nonetheless, I'd expect  
>> that a
>> local ref that cannot be parsed by git-rev-parse should also fail  
>> to be
>> pushed by git-send-pack. I didn't expect that git-send-pack would  
>> locate
>> <head> as someprefix/<head>.
>>
>> Why is my expectation wrong?
>> Or is the current specification of git-send-pack's ref parsing wrong?
>
> I think its a bug.  But I didn't write the original code.
>
> Meaning I think what happened here was someone wanted to enable
> git-send-pack to match "master" here with "refs/heads/master" on
> the remote side.  One easy way to do that was to see if any ref
> ended with "/master", as that was what the ref here was called.
>
> Way back when that code was written most Git repositories probably
> only ever had that one branch anyway, or maybe two (refs/heads/master
> and refs/heads/origin) so matching the trailing suffix never came
> up as a bug.  Nobody ever had two refs that could possibly match.
>
> Then the documentation got expanded to actually document the behavior
> that git-send-pack implemented.  Unfortunately that codified the
> bug as documented behavior.
>
>
> So I agree with you Steffen, this is a bug in send-pack, and I run
> up against it every once in a while.  I've specifically told my
> coworkers "NEVER, EVER, EVER, create a branch called 'master' that
> isn't exactly refs/heads/master OR ELSE I WILL COME BEAT YOU WITH A
> CLUE STICK".  They still create "refs/heads/experiments/master".
> *sigh*.
>
> I think we should fix it.  Anyone that is relying on "git push
> $url master" to resolve to "refs/heads/experimental/master" on the
> remote side is already playing with fire.  But Junio is (rightfully
> so) very conservative and doesn't like to break a user's scripts.
> We may not be able to fix this until Git 1.6.

I'm working on this and will send patches tomorrow.

	Steffen