Re: [PATCH] for-each-ref: `:short` format for `refname`

> Bert Wesarg <bert.wesarg@googlemail.com> wrote:
>> IMHO the goal of this new format for refname should be, that it can be
>> used as an ref on the command line. This isn't given with my current
>> :short proposal (which I call :strip as of now), as Gábor showed. What
>> we need is the reverse of what happened with refnames given on the
>> command line to commands like checkout/merge/... The only thing that
>> comes near to this is this from refs.c:
>>
>>     const char *ref_rev_parse_rules[] = {
>>             "%.*s",
>>             "refs/%.*s",
>>             "refs/tags/%.*s",
>>             "refs/heads/%.*s",
>>             "refs/remotes/%.*s",
>>             "refs/remotes/%.*s/HEAD",
>>             NULL
>>     };
>>
>> Which doesn't look very useful, because every ref from for_each_ref
>> would match rule one. So we probably need to try the reverse of this
>> list.
>
> Yup.  If you search the list backwards and extract the part of the
> ref that matches %.*s you'll get a name that other tools can find,
> and which is the shortest name possible.
>
> You can still get ambiguous names.  Avoiding them requires going
> through all refs and building their short forms, then using the
> full ref name for any ref which had more than one name shorten to
> the same string.  Ugly, but implementable, and probably something
> that should be considered.