Error with oddly named branch

[GregWoods]

error: cannot lock ref 'refs/heads/VladK_#160_Export_Selected_Question/Question_Transcript"_crashes_if_board_is_empty_(no_questions)': Unable to create 'C:/Projects/magicbullet/.git/refs/heads/VladK_#160_Export_Selected_Question/Question_Transcript"_crashes_if_board_is_empty_(no_questions).lock': Invalid argument

I know from reading around the subject the slashes can be a problem, but the odd double-quote in the middle looks like it could be the problem.

I have tried adding -B argument, where the file contains:

"VladK_#160_Export_Selected_Question/Question_Transcript\"_crashes_if_board_is_empty_(no_questions)"="VladK_#160_Export_Selected_Question__Question_Transcript_crashes_if_board_is_empty_(no_questions)"

Also, I cannot find any reference to this branch in the repository.
I asm assuming this is a branch, but maybe it is a tag?
The map file doesn't fix the problem.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[frej]

Yes that error is due to git requiring that a branch name must be a valid filename or path + filename on the host system. Using the branch map is the correct way to handle it, but there are two potential gotchas:

• For historical reasons (before the branch map mechanism was added) fast-export (imperfectly) mangles branch names it thinks won't be valid. I can't remove that functionality and say that maps are what should be used as it would break already existing incremental imports. If you have a branch name that fast-export decides to mangle you'll get a printout of the form Warning: sanitized branch [<unmangled>] to [<mangled>]. The branch map applies to the branch names before mangling, so that is probably the reason you can't find the troublesome branch in the repo, make sure to remap <unmangled> and it should work.

• Hg allows you to have a branch named a and another a/b, something that can't be represented in git as you can't have a file containing the hash of the head of a in refs/heads/a and the head of a/b in the file refs/heads/a/b in the same file system.

[frej]

Also consider if you want to use the new -n-flag from 1181a0a from the new v190913 release.

[GregWoods]

Adding the -n flag to my command line has fixed the issue,
Thank you!
I would still like to see an example of a valid branch map file, because I couldn't get it to do anything useful. However, this issue as raised, is resolved.

Note:
I switched to using Ubuntu 18.04LTS on Windows Subsystem for Linux instead of Git Bash, mostly to get a clean, reproducible environment. It works well.

[frej]

If it starts working with -n and an empty map file it's probably due to the automatic mangling, with among other things removes duplicated _ which probably can lead to clashes between two branches.

If you want to test out the branch mapping, run hg branches and pick a branch name from that list to rename, then run with -n -B <mapfile>. If that doesn't work, create a new issue for this.