From: Junio C Hamano Date: Wed, 09 May 2012 20:02:41 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH 11/19] bash prompt: use bash builtins to find out current branch Message-ID: <7vzk9hqg0u.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: <1336524290-30023-12-git-send-email-szeder@ira.uka.de> SZEDER Gábor writes: > Since HEAD is a single-line file and the symbolic ref format is quite > simple to recognize and parse,... Strictly speaking, that is true only if you somehow know that HEAD is not a symlinked symref. You may end up reading [0-9a-f]{40} out of HEAD without learning where the symbolic link pointed at. I personally do not _know_ of anybody who is still using a symlinked symref, but the reasoning behind 9f0bb90 (core.prefersymlinkrefs: use symlinks for .git/HEAD, 2006-05-02) cannot go away by definition until every project that benefited from the configuration the commit introduced goes extinct, so I wouldn't be surprised if you get complaints from the users if we adopt this patch.