Re: Feature request: git status --branch-only

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Nov 14, 2023, 20:18 UTC
Message-ID: <20231114201808.GE2092538@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <00033c86-dbd7-4c88-bfbd-8f6766cd66c9@gmail.com>

On Tue, Nov 14, 2023 at 03:02:04PM +0000, Phillip Wood wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> Hi Ondra
> 
> On 14/11/2023 12:40, Ondra Medek wrote:
> > Hi Phillip,
> > 
> > it does not work for a fresh clone of an empty repository
> > 
> >      git for-each-ref --format="%(upstream:short)" refs/heads/master
> > 
> > outputs nothing, while
> 
> Oh dear, that's a shame. I wonder if it is a bug because the documentation
> says that
> 
> 	--format="%(upstream:track)"
> 
> should print "[gone]" whenever an unknown upstream ref is encountered but
> trying that on a clone of an empty repository gives no output.

I think it would print "gone" if the upstream branch went missing. But in this case the actual local branch is missing. And for-each-ref will not show an entry at all for a ref that does not exist. The "refs/heads/master" on your command line is not a ref, but a pattern, and that pattern does not match anything. So it's working as intended.

I think a more direct tool would be:

  git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name master@{upstream}

That convinces branch_get_upstream() to return the value we want, but sadly it seems to get lost somewhere in the resolution process, and we spit out an error. Arguably that is a bug (with --symbolic or --symbolic-full-name, I think it would be OK to resolve names even if they don't point to something, but it's possible that would have other unexpected side effects).

-Peff