On Wed, 2015-04-29 at 20:37 -0400, Jeff King wrote: > On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 07:11:50PM -0400, Jeff King wrote: > > > Yeah, I agree if you let git punt on leaving the filesystem, most of the > > complicated problems go away. It still feels a bit more magical than I > > expect out of cat-file, and there are still corner cases (e.g., do we do > > cycle detection? Or just have a limit to the recursion depth?) > > I was pondering the "magical" above. I think what bugs me is that it > seems like a feature that is implemented as part of one random bit of > plumbing, but not available elsewhere. > > Conceptually, this is like peeling object names. You may give a tag > name, but if you ask for a tree commit we will peel the tag to a commit, > and the commit to a tree. This is sort of the same thing; you give a > path within a tree, and we will peel until we hit a "real" non-symlink > object. > > I don't know what the syntax would look like. To match "foo^{tree}" it > would be something like: > > HEAD:foo/bar^{resolve} > > or something like that. Except that it is a bad idea to allow "^{}" > syntax on the right-hand side of a colon, as it is ambiguous with > filenames that contain "^{resolve}". So it would have to look something > like: > > HEAD^{resolve}:foo/bar > > which is a _little_ weird, but actually kind of makes sense. The > "resolve" operation inherently is not just about the filename, but about > uses HEAD^{tree} as the root context. > > So I dunno. This pushes the resolving logic even _lower_ in the stack > than it would be in cat-file. So why do I like it more? Cognitive > dissonance? I guess I the appeal to me is that it: > > 1. Makes the concept available more generally (you can "rev-parse" it, > you can "git show" it, etc). It also lets you _name_ the object in > question, so you can ask for other things besides it contents (like > its name, its type, etc). > > 2. Positions it alongside other peeling name-resolution functions. Just to clarify: if you do git rev-parse, and the result is an out-of-tree symlink, you see /foo or ../foo instead of a sha? And if you "git show" it it says "symlink HEAD:../foo"? This seems totally reasonable to me, and solves my problem. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html