Re: [PATCH v2] symbolic-ref: teach "--[no-]recurse" option

From: Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>
Date: Oct 8, 2022, 04:54 UTC
Message-ID: <CAPig+cQHw_VjbA2_HaZJj3Q0v8C6uUukr40vXFuizx4M_04XFA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqsfjzaq78.fsf@gitster.g>

On Sat, Oct 8, 2022 at 12:34 AM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 20 quoted lines

> [...]
> One thing that is slightly irritating, however, is that I do not
> think there is a good way (other than "cat .git/HEAD") to learn that
> you checked out 'maint' to get into that state.  Just like the output
> of "git branch --show-current" shows above, "git symbolic-ref HEAD"
> would report 'refs/heads/maint-2.38', bypassing the intermediate
> symbolic ref at 'refs/heads/maint' that is pointed at by HEAD.
> [...]
> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
> ---
> diff --git a/Documentation/git-symbolic-ref.txt b/Documentation/git-symbolic-ref.txt
> @@ -46,6 +46,15 @@ OPTIONS
> +--recurse::
> +--no-recurse::
> +       When showing the value of <name> as a symbolic ref, if
> +       <name> refers to another symbolic ref, follow such a chain
> +       of symbolic refs until the result no longer points at a
> +       symbolic ref (`--recurse`, which is the default).
> +       `--no-recurse` stops after dereferencing only a single level
> +       of symbolic ref.

With his recent documentation-normalization work, I suspect Ævar would appreciate an update to the synopsis, as well:

    SYNOPSIS
    --------
    [verse]
    'git symbolic-ref' [-m <reason>] <name> <ref>
   -'git symbolic-ref' [-q] [--short] <name>
   +'git symbolic-ref' [-q] [--short] [--no-recurse] <name>
    'git symbolic-ref' --delete [-q] <name>

or something similar (i.e. plain [--recurse] or composite [--[no-]-recurse] or [--recurse | --no-recurse]).