There are some disadvantages to the old-style personal branch scheme.
It only allows one specific pattern (of refname) to be used, forces that
pattern to be applicable to *all* repos in the entire config, and
requires editing the rc file (on the server) to be edited to achieve
this.
In other words, it's a very blunt instrument...
The new style depends on using lines like this within a specific repo
config:
RW+ personal/USER/ = @userlist
The important thing is that the "branch" name should contain `/USER/`
(including the slashes). Access is still determined by the right hand
side of course.
This gives you the following advantages:
- allow it only for repos that need it
- allow different patterns to be used for different repos
- allow *multiple* patterns; just add more than one such line
- allow the pattern to have suffixes (eg: foo/USER/bar)