[PATCH v4 2/6] show-branch doc: say <ref>, not <reference>

From: Junio C Hamano via GitGitGadget <gitgitgadget@gmail.com>
Date: May 19, 2023, 04:17 UTC
Message-ID: <ea10e7964a990cff7ceaeec6257908001dc403e9.1684469874.git.gitgitgadget@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <pull.1471.v4.git.git.1684469874.gitgitgadget@gmail.com>

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

The glossary defines 'ref' as the official name of the thing, and the output from "git grep -e '<ref' Documentation/" shows that most everybody uses <ref>, not <reference>. In addition, the page already says <ref> in its SYNOPSIS section for the command when it is used in the mode to follow the reflogs.

Strictly speaking, many references of these should be updated to <commit> after adding an explanation on how these <commit>s are discovered (i.e. we take <rev>, <glob>, or <ref> and starting from these commits, follow their ancestry or reflog entries to list commits), but that would be a lot bigger change I would rather not to do in this patch, whose primary purpose is to make the existing documentation more consistent.

Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Signed-off-by: Sean Allred <allred.sean@gmail.com>
---
 Documentation/git-show-branch.txt | 16 ++++++++--------
 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/git-show-branch.txt b/Documentation/git-show-branch.txt
index 71f608b1ff1..58cf6210cde 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-show-branch.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-show-branch.txt
@@ -74,8 +74,7 @@ OPTIONS
 	that is the common ancestor of all the branches.  This
 	flag tells the command to go <n> more common commits
 	beyond that.  When <n> is negative, display only the
-	<reference>s given, without showing the commit ancestry
-	tree.
+	<ref>s given, without showing the commit ancestry tree.
 
 --list::
 	Synonym to `--more=-1`
@@ -88,8 +87,8 @@ OPTIONS
 	the case of three or more commits.
 
 --independent::
-	Among the <reference>s given, display only the ones that
-	cannot be reached from any other <reference>.
+	Among the <ref>s given, display only the ones that cannot be
+	reached from any other <ref>.
 
 --no-name::
 	Do not show naming strings for each commit.
@@ -132,10 +131,11 @@ are mutually exclusive.
 
 OUTPUT
 ------
-Given N <references>, the first N lines are the one-line
-description from their commit message.  The branch head that is
-pointed at by $GIT_DIR/HEAD is prefixed with an asterisk `*`
-character while other heads are prefixed with a `!` character.
+
+Given N <ref>s, the first N lines are the one-line description from
+their commit message. The branch head that is pointed at by
+$GIT_DIR/HEAD is prefixed with an asterisk `*` character while other
+heads are prefixed with a `!` character.
 
 Following these N lines, one-line log for each commit is
 displayed, indented N places.  If a commit is on the I-th

-- 
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