Re: Looking for a way to turn off/modify ref disambiguation

From: Michael J Gruber <git@drmicha.warpmail.net>
Date: Aug 24, 2011, 09:25 UTC
Message-ID: <4E54C373.1070702@drmicha.warpmail.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vei0brdiq.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano venit, vidit, dixit 24.08.2011 00:03:

Show 19 quoted lines

> "Nathan W. Panike" <nathan.panike@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>>        1.          If $GIT_DIR/<name> exists, that is what you mean
>> (this is usually useful only for HEAD, FETCH_HEAD, ORIG_HEAD,
>> MERGE_HEAD and CHERRY_PICK_HEAD);
>>        2.          otherwise, refs/<name> if it exists;
>>        3.          otherwise, refs/tags/<refname> if it exists;
>>        4.          otherwise, refs/heads/<name> if it exists;
>>        5.          otherwise, refs/remotes/<name> if it exists;
>>        6.          otherwise, refs/remotes/<name>/HEAD if it exists.
>> ...
>>
>> Is there any way to change this behavior, e.g., so that rule 6 becomes
>> an error?
> 
> You will force people to say "git log origin/master..master" to measure
> their progress if you did so, when "git log origin..master" has been the
> way described in many git books and documentation pages floating on the
> web.

I haven't come across advice like that. In our own documentation, we don't explain it, and in our user-manual "origin" is used as the name of a branch.

I consider that advice very bad indeed:

If "origin..master" is resolved to "master ^origin/master", then obviously "origin..next" is resolved to "next ^origin/next" - but it is not, of course, and the fact that "origin" is resolved to "origin/master" depends on the content of "origin/HEAD", which the upstream repo owner controls (in the sense that upstream's HEAD determines it), not downstream.

Thus, teaching "origin..master" as a way of measuring your progress is grossly misleading. "@{u}.." does that when you're on the branch in question, and we have no notation for "@{u(master)}..master".

Side note:

In fact, who groks symbolic refs anyway? I mean, git-reset sets HEAD and git-checkout does so, right? ;) (I'm afraid I need to clean up after myself in git-reset(1)...)

> I think it is _very_ unlikely that such a change is going to happen.

If messing with the origin..master notation is the only fall-out I'm all for it.

But note that the OP only asked for a way to turn off disambiguation, not for a change of defaults..

Michael