On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 04:33:36PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> A flag to affect the behaviour (as opposed to &flag as a secondary
> return value, like Peff's patch does) can be made to work. Perhaps
> a flag that says "keep the input as is if the result is not a local
> branch name" would pass an input "@" intact and that may be
> sufficient to allow "git branch -m @" to rename the current branch
> to "@" (I do not think it is a sensible rename, though ;-). But
> probably some callers need to keep the original input and compare
> with the result to see if we expanded anything if we go that route.
> At that point, I am not sure if there are much differences in the
> ease of use between the two approaches.
I just went into more detail in my reply to Jacob, but I do think this
is a workable approach (and fortunately we seem to have banned bare "@"
as a name, along with anything containing "@{}", so I think we would end
up rejecting these nonsense names).
I'll see if I can work up a patch. We'll still need to pass the flag
around through the various functions, but at least it will be a flag and
not a confusing negated out-parameter.
-Peff