lstat() call in rev-parse.c

Why does git-rev-parse do an lstat on some of its arguments, at line 345 of rev-parse.c, and die if the lstat fails? It doesn't seem to do anything with the result.

The effect is that if you do "gitk a b", it works as long as a and b exist (as files or directories), but fails if they don't, and some users have found this confusing. Yes they should put in a --, but it's not obvious to users why this should make it work in the case when a or b doesn't exist.

(And yes I just took out the git-rev-parse call from gitk, but I'm going to need to do git-rev-parse --no-refs --no-flags for some changes I'm doing at the moment.)

Paul.