On Fri, Nov 16, 2018 at 02:09:07PM +0900, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes: > > > On Thu, Nov 15, 2018 at 04:38:44AM -0500, Jeff King wrote: > > > >> Is SOURCE_NONE a complete match for what we want? > >> > >> I see problems in both directions: > >> > >> - sorting by "objectname" works now, but it's marked with SOURCE_OBJ, > >> and would be forbidden with your patch. I'm actually not sure if > >> SOURCE_OBJ is accurate; we shouldn't need to access the object to > >> show it (and we are probably wasting effort loading the full contents > >> for tools like for-each-ref). > >> > >> However, that's not the full story. For objectname:short, it _does_ call > >> find_unique_abbrev(). So we expect to have an object directory. > > > > Oops, I'm apparently bad at reading. It is in fact SOURCE_OTHER, which > > makes sense (outside of this whole "--sort outside a repo thing"). > > > > But we'd ideally distinguish between "objectname" (which should be OK > > outside a repo) and "objectname:short" (which currently segfaults). > > Arguably, use of ref-filter machinery in ls-remote, whether it is > given from inside or outside a repo, was a mistake in 1fb20dfd > ("ls-remote: create '--sort' option", 2018-04-09), as the whole > point of "ls-remote" is to peek the list of refs and it is perfectly > normal that the objects listed are not available. I hope that one day 'git ls-remote' will learn to '--format=...' its output, and I think that (re)using the ref-filter machinery would be the right way to go to achive that. Sure, ref-filter supports a lot of format specifiers that don't at all make sense in the context of 'ls-remote' (perhaps we should have a dedicated set of valid_atoms for that), but I think it's perfectly reasonable to do something like: git ls-remote --format=%(refname:strip=2) remote A concrete use case for that could be to eliminate the last remaining shell loops from refs completion.