Re: How to display "HEAD~*" in "git log"

From: Konstantin Khomoutov <kostix@bswap.ru>
Date: Jul 6, 2022, 18:21 UTC
Message-ID: <20220706182149.gg75w6uonm4hs5af@carbon>
In-Reply-To: <YsW9BI61tWGh9OJo@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On Wed, Jul 06, 2022 at 12:49:08PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

[...]

Show 10 quoted lines

> > I pondered about `git name-rev` but failed to figure out how to make it accept
> > just "HEAD" as the point of reference. Passing it "--refs=HEAD"
> > (or "--refs HEAD", FWIW) does not appear to do what I'd expect it to: a couple
> > of top commits are not annotated at all, and then they start to get annotated
> > relative to "origin/HEAD". Note that I've tested this on a detached HEAD which
> > contains an unmerged line of history.
> 
> Right. The problem is that it gets the set of possible ref tips with
> for_each_ref(), which will not include HEAD. And then worse, since the
> argument to "--refs" is a pattern, it matches junk like origin/HEAD.

Do I assume correctly that `git for-each-ref HEAD` does nothing, successfully, for the very same reason? If so, I wonder if this should be somehow reflected in the docs. I mean, I have always maintained an impression that things like HEAD, ORIGIN_HEAD, FETCH_HEAD etc are also "refs" - because they, well, reference commits or branches.

The gitglossary manual page of my Git 2.30.2 states that

| ref
|   A name that begins with refs/ (e.g. refs/heads/master)
| <...>
|   There are a few special-purpose refs that do not begin with refs/.
|   The most notable example is HEAD.

which suggests that HEAD is a ref.