threads / patch / 29105

patchgit symbolic-ref: documentation fix

Subject: [PATCH] git symbolic-ref: documentation fix

## tl;dr

2 messages between Dec 7, 2011 and Dec 9, 2011. Diffs are folded; open one to read it.

replies: 1people: 2as markdown or json

mhagger@alum.mit.edu· Dec 7, 2011, 15:20 UTC · lore
From: Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>

The old "git symbolic-ref" manpage seemed to imply in one place that symlinks are still the default way to represent symbolic references and in another that symlinks are deprecated. Fix the text and shorten the justification for the change of implementation.

Signed-off-by: Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>
---
 Documentation/git-symbolic-ref.txt |    9 +++------
 1 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)
Show changes to Documentation/git-symbolic-ref.txt +3 −6
diff --git a/Documentation/git-symbolic-ref.txt b/Documentation/git-symbolic-ref.txt
index 75b1ae5..a45d4c4 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-symbolic-ref.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-symbolic-ref.txt
@@ -43,12 +43,9 @@ In the past, `.git/HEAD` was a symbolic link pointing at
 `refs/heads/master`.  When we wanted to switch to another branch,
 we did `ln -sf refs/heads/newbranch .git/HEAD`, and when we wanted
 to find out which branch we are on, we did `readlink .git/HEAD`.
-This was fine, and internally that is what still happens by
-default, but on platforms that do not have working symlinks,
-or that do not have the `readlink(1)` command, this was a bit
-cumbersome.  On some platforms, `ln -sf` does not even work as
-advertised (horrors).  Therefore symbolic links are now deprecated
-and symbolic refs are used by default.
+But symbolic links are not entirely portable, so they are now
+deprecated and symbolic refs (as described above) are used by
+default.
 
 'git symbolic-ref' will exit with status 0 if the contents of the
 symbolic ref were printed correctly, with status 1 if the requested
-- 
1.7.8

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