Re: git-branch --print-current

From: demerphq <demerphq@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 4, 2009, 12:49 UTC
Message-ID: <9b18b3110901040449x65c63d6fo3d9fec9ddd5670c@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <quack.20090104T0440.lthbpun1bxo@roar.cs.berkeley.edu>

2009/1/4 Karl Chen <quarl@cs.berkeley.edu>:

Show 12 quoted lines

>>>>>> On 2009-01-04 00:21 PST, Arnaud Lacombe writes:
>
>    Arnaud> FWIW, I had this in a stalled modification in a tree,
>    Arnaud> it just add the '-c' (as "current") option to git
>    Arnaud> branch. Patch is mostly for the record :/
>
> Thanks, glad someone else wanted this too.  If we modified
> git-symbolic-ref it would probably be less code since it doesn't
> have to loop over all branches, though from a UI perspective I
> still prefer git-branch.  Anyway doesn't look like people like the
> idea so how about that git-rev-parse --symbolic-abbrev-name idea
> :)

FWIW: I like the idea. Ive always thought that a --current flag to git
branch was missing. IOW i should be able to do:

   branch=`git branch --current`

and get back a usable branch name. I dont think one should need to rely on awk or sed or scripts to find this out, if only for portability reasons.

Show 10 quoted lines

>
>    Arnaud> The main trouble I have with pipe stuff is that it
>    Arnaud> forks a process for something that can be done
>    Arnaud> natively. Previously, I was using awk(1) to extract
>    Arnaud> the current branch:
>
>    Arnaud> $ git branch | awk '/^\*/ {print $2}'
>
> Yet another addition to the list of ways to pipeline it, this one
> probably the shortest :)

Unfortunately it doesnt work well when you arent on a branch:

  $ git branch | awk '/^\*/ {print $2}'
  (no

So far two apparently expert git people have given solutions to this problem that don't elegantly handle the edge cases.

That seems to me to be a powerful argument that it is actually more difficult to do than is being represented here on the list, and deserves to be native level git functionality.

Cheers, yves

-- 
perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"