On Mon, Oct 01, 2018 at 07:23:58PM -0700, Taylor Blau wrote: > +core.alternateRefsCommand:: > + When advertising tips of available history from an alternate, use the shell to > + execute the specified command instead of linkgit:git-for-each-ref[1]. The > + first argument is the absolute path of the alternate. Output must contain one > + hex object id per line (i.e., the same as produce by `git for-each-ref > + --format='%(objectname)'`). > ++ > +This is useful when a repository only wishes to advertise some of its > +alternate's references as `.have`'s. For example, to only advertise branch > +heads, configure `core.alternateRefsCommand` to the path of a script which runs > +`git --git-dir="$1" for-each-ref --format='%(objectname)' refs/heads`. > ++ > +Note that the configured value is executed in a shell, and thus > +linkgit:git-for-each-ref[1] by itself does not work, as scripts have to handle > +the path argument specially. This last paragraph is trying to fix the wrong-impression that we discussed in the last round. But I'm not sure it doesn't make things more confusing. ;) Specifically, the problem isn't the shell. The issue is that we pass the repo path as an argument to the command. So either: - it's a real command that we run, in which case git-for-each-ref does not take a repo path argument and so doesn't work; or - it's a shell snippet, in which case the argument is appended to the snippet (and here's where you can get into a rabbit hole of explaining how our shell invocation works, and we should avoid that) Can we just say: Note that you cannot generally put `git for-each-ref` directly into the config value, as it does not take a repository path as an argument (but you can wrap the command above in a shell script). > [...] The rest of the patch looks good to me, along with the other three (modulo the "expect" fixup you already sent). -Peff