Re: [PATCH] show-ref: add --unresolved option

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Mar 6, 2024, 00:41 UTC
Message-ID: <20240306004139.GB3797463@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <pull.1684.git.git.1709592718743.gitgitgadget@gmail.com>

On Mon, Mar 04, 2024 at 10:51:58PM +0000, John Cai via GitGitGadget wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> From: John Cai <johncai86@gmail.com>
> 
> For reftable development, it would be handy to have a tool to provide
> the direct value of any ref whether it be a symbolic ref or not.
> Currently there is git-symbolic-ref, which only works for symbolic refs,
> and git-rev-parse, which will resolve the ref. Let's add a --unresolved
> option that will only take one ref and return whatever it points to
> without dereferencing it.

What about "git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name"? I don't think that behaves quite the same as your patch here:

  - it is actually not a true no-deref; it resolves to the final name
    and then prints it (so the behavior is the same for a single-level
    symref, but I believe a multi-level symref chain like
    one->two->three will print "three" when resolving "one").

  - it always prints the resolved name, whereas your patch prints an oid
    for non-symrefs

I'm not sure if those are important or not, as I don't quite understand what you're trying to accomplish. I'd probably have just run:

  git symbolic-ref -q $name || git rev-parse --verify $name

I'm not opposed to making that more ergonomic, but I think we should avoid redundant plumbing options if we can (I'm not sure yet if this is redundant or not, but in general I find "show-ref" to be a weird mix of "rev-parse" and "for-each-ref" that I'd be just as happy if it did not exist).

-Peff