Re: [PATCH] git-prompt: stop manually parsing HEAD

> On Fri, Nov 24, 2023 at 6:37 AM Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im> wrote:
> > We're manually parsing the HEAD reference in git-prompt to figure out
> > whether it is a symbolic or direct reference. This makes it intimately
> > tied to the on-disk format we use to store references and will stop
> > working once we gain additional reference backends in the Git project.
> >
> > Refactor the code to always use git-symbolic-ref(1) to read HEAD, which
> > is both simpler and compatible with alternate reference backends.
> 
> This may get some push-back from Windows folks due to high
> process-creation cost on that platform. As I recall, over the years, a
> good deal of effort has been put into reducing the number of programs
> run each time the prompt is displayed, precisely because invoking Git
> (or other programs) multiple times became unbearably slow. In
> particular, optimizations efforts have focussed on computing as much
> as possible within the shell itself rather than invoking external
> programs for the same purpose. Thus, this seems to be taking a step
> backwards in that regard for the common or status quo case.
> 
> Would it be possible instead to, within shell, detect if the historic
> file-based backend is being used in the current repository, thus
> continue using the existing shell code for that case, and only employ
> git-symbolic-ref if some other backend is in use?