Junio C HamanoSuppose you are managing many maintenance tracks in your project, and some of the more recent ones are maint-2.36 and maint-2.37. Further imagine that your project recently tagged the official 2.38 release, which means you would need to start maint-2.38 track soon, by doing:
$ git checkout -b maint-2.38 v2.38.0^0
$ git branch --list 'maint-2.3[6-9]'
* maint-2.38
maint-2.36
maint-2.37So far, so good. But it also is reasonable to want not to have to worry about which maintenance track is the latest, by pointing a more generic-sounding 'maint' branch at it, by doing:
$ git symbolic-ref refs/heads/maint refs/heads/maint-2.38
which would allow you to say "whichever it is, check out the latest maintenance track", by doing:
$ git checkout maint $ git branch --show-current maint-2.38
It is arguably better to say that we are on 'maint-2.38' rather than on 'maint', and "git merge/pull" would record "into maint-2.38" and not "into maint", so I think what we have is a good behaviour.
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.
The internal resolve_ref() API already has the necessary support for stopping after resolving a single level of a symbolic-ref, and we can expose it by adding a "--[no-]recurse" option to the command.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> --- builtin/symbolic-ref.c | 16 ++++++++++------ t/t1401-symbolic-ref.sh | 14 ++++++++++++++ 2 files changed, 24 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)
Show changes to diff +24 −6
diff --git c/builtin/symbolic-ref.c w/builtin/symbolic-ref.c index 1b0f10225f..5c9de63267 100644 --- c/builtin/symbolic-ref.c +++ w/builtin/symbolic-ref.c @@ -10,10 +10,13 @@ static const char * const git_symbolic_ref_usage[] = { NULL }; -static int check_symref(const char *HEAD, int quiet, int shorten, int print) +static int check_symref(const char *HEAD, int quiet, int shorten, int recurse, int print) { - int flag; - const char *refname = resolve_ref_unsafe(HEAD, 0, NULL, &flag); + int resolve_flags, flag; + const char *refname; + + resolve_flags = (recurse ? 0 : RESOLVE_REF_NO_RECURSE); + refname = resolve_ref_unsafe(HEAD, resolve_flags, NULL, &flag); if (!refname) die("No such ref: %s", HEAD); @@ -35,13 +38,14 @@ static int check_symref(const char *HEAD, int quiet, int shorten, int print) int cmd_symbolic_ref(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix) { - int quiet = 0, delete = 0, shorten = 0, ret = 0; + int quiet = 0, delete = 0, shorten = 0, recurse = 1, ret = 0; const char *msg = NULL; struct option options[] = { OPT__QUIET(&quiet, N_("suppress error message for non-symbolic (detached) refs")), OPT_BOOL('d', "delete", &delete, N_("delete symbolic ref")), OPT_BOOL(0, "short", &shorten, N_("shorten ref output")), + OPT_BOOL(0, "recurse", &recurse, N_("recursively dereference (default)")), OPT_STRING('m', NULL, &msg, N_("reason"), N_("reason of the update")), OPT_END(), }; @@ -55,7 +59,7 @@ int cmd_symbolic_ref(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix) if (delete) { if (argc != 1) usage_with_options(git_symbolic_ref_usage, options); - ret = check_symref(argv[0], 1, 0, 0); + ret = check_symref(argv[0], 1, 0, 0, 0); if (ret) die("Cannot delete %s, not a symbolic ref", argv[0]); if (!strcmp(argv[0], "HEAD")) @@ -65,7 +69,7 @@ int cmd_symbolic_ref(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix) switch (argc) { case 1: - ret = check_symref(argv[0], quiet, shorten, 1); + ret = check_symref(argv[0], quiet, shorten, recurse, 1); break; case 2: if (!strcmp(argv[0], "HEAD") && diff --git c/t/t1401-symbolic-ref.sh w/t/t1401-symbolic-ref.sh index 0c204089b8..d708acdb81 100755 --- c/t/t1401-symbolic-ref.sh +++ w/t/t1401-symbolic-ref.sh @@ -175,4 +175,18 @@ test_expect_success 'symbolic-ref allows top-level target for non-HEAD' ' test_cmp_rev top-level HEAD ' +test_expect_success 'symbolic-ref pointing at another' ' + git update-ref refs/heads/maint-2.37 HEAD && + git symbolic-ref refs/heads/maint refs/heads/maint-2.37 && + git checkout maint && + + git symbolic-ref HEAD >actual && + echo refs/heads/maint-2.37 >expect && + test_cmp expect actual && + + git symbolic-ref --no-recurse HEAD >actual && + echo refs/heads/maint >expect && + test_cmp expect actual +' + test_done
