Re: [PATCH v3 2/3] Modify pseudo refs through ref backend storage

[Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanwen@google.com>]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2020 at 12:18 PM Johannes Schindelin
<Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
> The reason is that there exists a `refs/heads/foo` _and_ the symref `FOO`
> (which points to `refs/heads/master`, which is at 1e995a).
>
> An earlier symptom of this bug is visible on Linux, too, though: when
> you run t1405.4 'delete_refs(FOO, refs/tags/new-tag)', it shows this:
>
>         + git rev-parse FOO --
>         warning: ignoring dangling symref FOO
>         fatal: bad revision 'FOO'

Thanks, this was very helpful for debugging.

The reason is that we do split_symref_update(), where a transaction
that modifies SYMREF (pointing to REFERENT) without REF_NO_DEREF is
changed to a transaction that modifies REFERENT and a reflog-only
update for SYMREF. In this case, that leaves the FOO symref in place.

This seems very specific to the test (is there any use of symrefs
beyond HEAD?) , and I fixed it by passing REF_NO_DEREF to the
delete-refs call.

It would also be nice if this behavior was lifted out of the files
backend and into the generic layer, but it's not yet clear to me if
this is possible.

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Han-Wen Nienhuys - Google Munich
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