Josh Triplett authored Jul 05, 2011 and Junio C Hamano committed Jul 06, 2011

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>