Re: [PATCH] show-ref: add --unresolved option

> On Mon, Mar 04, 2024 at 10:51:58PM +0000, John Cai via GitGitGadget wrote:
> 
> > From: John Cai <johncai86@gmail.com>
> > 
> > For reftable development, it would be handy to have a tool to provide
> > the direct value of any ref whether it be a symbolic ref or not.
> > Currently there is git-symbolic-ref, which only works for symbolic refs,
> > and git-rev-parse, which will resolve the ref. Let's add a --unresolved
> > option that will only take one ref and return whatever it points to
> > without dereferencing it.
> 
> What about "git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name"? I don't think that
> behaves quite the same as your patch here:
> 
>   - it is actually not a true no-deref; it resolves to the final name
>     and then prints it (so the behavior is the same for a single-level
>     symref, but I believe a multi-level symref chain like
>     one->two->three will print "three" when resolving "one").
> 
>   - it always prints the resolved name, whereas your patch prints an oid
>     for non-symrefs
> 
> I'm not sure if those are important or not, as I don't quite understand
> what you're trying to accomplish. I'd probably have just run:
> 
>   git symbolic-ref -q $name || git rev-parse --verify $name
> 
> I'm not opposed to making that more ergonomic, but I think we should
> avoid redundant plumbing options if we can (I'm not sure yet if this is
> redundant or not, but in general I find "show-ref" to be a weird mix of
> "rev-parse" and "for-each-ref" that I'd be just as happy if it did not
> exist).