I'd like to be able to know what git-push will do

I previously sent this to Junio, but I think I should have just sent it to the list.

I'd like to be able to call git-push --dry-run and process the result from a perl script, but there's a snag: what does "foobar -> foobar" mean? foobar could be a tag or a branch. In fact, it could be a branch on on side and a tag on the other!

I've tried duplicating the refspec processing in the perl script, but this approach is highly sub-optimal because the refspec parsing and matching is so complicated. I would wind up duplicating a lot of functionality, and every time it changed in git my script would become broken.

Would you accept a patch that changes the behavior of git-push so that instead of

  $ git-push --dry-run  -v origin :
  Pushing to ~/repos/bin
  To ~/repos/bin
   = [up to date]      master -> master
  Everything up-to-date
  
It would print the full names like this (only if -v is used)

  $ git-push --dry-run  -v origin :
  Pushing to ~/repos/bin
  To ~/repos/bin
   = [up to date]      refs/heads/master -> refs/heads/master
  Everything up-to-date

Or, if you don't like changing the behavior of -v, would you accept a patch with a new option (perhaps --symbolic-full-name) that caused git-push to behave this way?

Once I know what the user interface should be (-v or --symbolic-full-name or whatever) I'll post a patch.

Thanks!

        --larry