ref namespaces: infrastructure

Add support for dividing the refs of a single repository into multiple
namespaces, each of which can have its own branches, tags, and HEAD.
Git can expose each namespace as an independent repository to pull from
and push to, while sharing the object store, and exposing all the refs
to operations such as git-gc.

Storing multiple repositories as namespaces of a single repository
avoids storing duplicate copies of the same objects, such as when
storing multiple branches of the same source.  The alternates mechanism
provides similar support for avoiding duplicates, but alternates do not
prevent duplication between new objects added to the repositories
without ongoing maintenance, while namespaces do.

To specify a namespace, set the GIT_NAMESPACE environment variable to
the namespace.  For each ref namespace, git stores the corresponding
refs in a directory under refs/namespaces/.  For example,
GIT_NAMESPACE=foo will store refs under refs/namespaces/foo/.  You can
also specify namespaces via the --namespace option to git.

Note that namespaces which include a / will expand to a hierarchy of
namespaces; for example, GIT_NAMESPACE=foo/bar will store refs under
refs/namespaces/foo/refs/namespaces/bar/.  This makes paths in
GIT_NAMESPACE behave hierarchically, so that cloning with
GIT_NAMESPACE=foo/bar produces the same result as cloning with
GIT_NAMESPACE=foo and cloning from that repo with GIT_NAMESPACE=bar.  It
also avoids ambiguity with strange namespace paths such as
foo/refs/heads/, which could otherwise generate directory/file conflicts
within the refs directory.

Add the infrastructure for ref namespaces: handle the GIT_NAMESPACE
environment variable and --namespace option, and support iterating over
refs in a namespace.

Signed-off-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
Signed-off-by: Jamey Sharp <jamey@minilop.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/refs.h b/refs.h
index 5e7a9a59f5..9a5c9e02fb 100644
--- a/refs.h
+++ b/refs.h
@@ -36,6 +36,9 @@ extern int for_each_tag_ref_submodule(const char *submodule, each_ref_fn fn, voi
 extern int for_each_branch_ref_submodule(const char *submodule, each_ref_fn fn, void *cb_data);
 extern int for_each_remote_ref_submodule(const char *submodule, each_ref_fn fn, void *cb_data);
 
+extern int head_ref_namespaced(each_ref_fn fn, void *cb_data);
+extern int for_each_namespaced_ref(each_ref_fn fn, void *cb_data);
+
 static inline const char *has_glob_specials(const char *pattern)
 {
 	return strpbrk(pattern, "?*[");