Before this change, only ref strings not starting with the regex prefix for uploads allowed the latter. This was against the documentation [1] saying that "Reference names can also be described with a regular expression by prefixing the reference name with ^." [1] https://gerrit-documentation.storage.googleapis.com/Documentation/2.15.14/access-control.html#_project_access_control_lists Bug: Issue 10763 Change-Id: I6b685a7f140d82f0278b8efec271a78d92608b94