refs: explicitly catch leading slashes

It's somewhat common to try to write "/refs/tags/something". There is
no easy way to catch it during the main body of the function, as there
is no way to distinguish whether it's a leading slash or a double
slash somewhere in the middle.

Catch this at the beginning so we don't trigger the assert in
is_all_caps_and_underscore().
Merge pull request #1401 from carlosmn/leading-slash

refs: explicitly catch leading slashes