Re: [PATCH v12 4/8] remote set-head: better output for --auto

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Nov 16, 2024, 00:22 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqjzd4yqlv.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <D5N4TN6WX65V.JJKLX5ROS8NN@ferdinandy.com>

"Bence Ferdinandy" <bence@ferdinandy.com> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

>> so refs_read_symbolic_ref -> 1 only happens if there's a valid non-symbolic ref
>> in origin/HEAD. So maybe if we put "Not a symbolic reference." in the referent
>> (which should be an invalid symref), the caller could check for that and then
>> should be able to distinguish this special case?
>
> On second thought, it would maybe make even more sense to get the reference
> hash and put that into referent. In that case the output could still be
>
> "'%s/HEAD' has changed from '%s' and now points to '%s'\n"
>
> but with a non-symref after from.

The output may look like the above, but people would certainly wish to clarify and/or translate "from '%s'" part. And to allow that, we may need to signal a bit more explicitly that we saw a non-symref HEAD there so that we can tell between a detached HEAD and a confusingly named branch whose name is 40-hex.

Otherwise, one who tries to update that "has changed from '%s'" message to clarify between "pointed at branch '%s'" and "pointed at commit '%s'" (or translate into a language where the distinction matters, perhaps because branch and commit have different gender there that affects conjugation for "has changed from" part, or something hand-wavy) have insufficient information to work with.

Thanks.