Re: [PATCH 2/2] peel_onion(): teach $foo^{object} peeler

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 2, 2013, 15:45 UTC
Message-ID: <7vfvz9gclo.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <515A94C7.3000406@alum.mit.edu>

Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> writes:

> Off topic: Your patch reminds me of something else that surprised me:
> there is no "$userstring^{tag}".  I suppose it would be a bit ambiguous,
> given that tags can point at tags, and it would also be less useful than
> the other suffixes.  But its absence irked the completionist in me :-)

Yes, unfortunately, foo^{type} means "start from foo, and until what you are looking at it is of type, repeatedly peel to see if you can get to an object of that type, or stop and report an error". If a tag A points at another tag B, which in turn points at an object C, you will never see B by applying usual peeling operator.

Also, v1.8.2^{tag} would be give the tag itself, while master^{tag} would not report the commit "master" but would error out, which would be useless. You are better off doing `git cat-file -t foo` and seeing if it is a tag object at that point.