Suppose 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-2.37
So 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@xxxxxxxxx>
---
* The third time is the charm? The only change since v2 is to make
sure that Ævar's "doc SYNOPSIS and cmd -h help must match" topic
is not upset with the new option.
Documentation/git-symbolic-ref.txt | 11 ++++++++++-
builtin/symbolic-ref.c | 18 +++++++++++-------
t/t1401-symbolic-ref.sh | 14 ++++++++++++++
3 files changed, 35 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)
diff --git a/Documentation/git-symbolic-ref.txt b/Documentation/git-symbolic-ref.txt
index ef68ad2b71..102c83eb19 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-symbolic-ref.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-symbolic-ref.txt
@@ -9,7 +9,7 @@ SYNOPSIS
--------
[verse]
'git symbolic-ref' [-m <reason>] <name> <ref>
-'git symbolic-ref' [-q] [--short] <name>
+'git symbolic-ref' [-q] [--short] [--no-recurse] <name>
'git symbolic-ref' --delete [-q] <name>
DESCRIPTION
@@ -46,6 +46,15 @@ OPTIONS
When showing the value of <name> as a symbolic ref, try to shorten the
value, e.g. from `refs/heads/master` to `master`.
+--recurse::
+--no-recurse::
+ When showing the value of <name> as a symbolic ref, if
+ <name> refers to another symbolic ref, follow such a chain
+ of symbolic refs until the result no longer points at a
+ symbolic ref (`--recurse`, which is the default).
+ `--no-recurse` stops after dereferencing only a single level
+ of symbolic ref.
+
-m::
Update the reflog for <name> with <reason>. This is valid only
when creating or updating a symbolic ref.
diff --git a/builtin/symbolic-ref.c b/builtin/symbolic-ref.c
index e547a08d6c..d5a70e7bd8 100644
--- a/builtin/symbolic-ref.c
+++ b/builtin/symbolic-ref.c
@@ -6,14 +6,17 @@
static const char * const git_symbolic_ref_usage[] = {
N_("git symbolic-ref [<options>] <name> [<ref>]"),
- N_("git symbolic-ref -d [-q] <name>"),
+ N_("git symbolic-ref -d [-q] [--no-recurse] <name>"),
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 a/t/t1401-symbolic-ref.sh b/t/t1401-symbolic-ref.sh
index 132a1b885a..773a6e8e01 100755
--- a/t/t1401-symbolic-ref.sh
+++ b/t/t1401-symbolic-ref.sh
@@ -163,4 +163,18 @@ test_expect_success 'symbolic-ref can resolve d/f name (ENOTDIR)' '
test_cmp expect actual
'
+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
--
2.38.0-167-gf9a88ca9e9
