On Mon, Mar 04, 2024 at 10:51:58PM +0000, John Cai via GitGitGadget wrote:
> From: John Cai <johncai86@xxxxxxxxx>
>
> For reftable development, it would be handy to have a tool to provide
> the direct value of any ref whether it be a symbolic ref or not.
> Currently there is git-symbolic-ref, which only works for symbolic refs,
> and git-rev-parse, which will resolve the ref. Let's add a --unresolved
> option that will only take one ref and return whatever it points to
> without dereferencing it.
What about "git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name"? I don't think that
behaves quite the same as your patch here:
- it is actually not a true no-deref; it resolves to the final name
and then prints it (so the behavior is the same for a single-level
symref, but I believe a multi-level symref chain like
one->two->three will print "three" when resolving "one").
- it always prints the resolved name, whereas your patch prints an oid
for non-symrefs
I'm not sure if those are important or not, as I don't quite understand
what you're trying to accomplish. I'd probably have just run:
git symbolic-ref -q $name || git rev-parse --verify $name
I'm not opposed to making that more ergonomic, but I think we should
avoid redundant plumbing options if we can (I'm not sure yet if this is
redundant or not, but in general I find "show-ref" to be a weird mix of
"rev-parse" and "for-each-ref" that I'd be just as happy if it did not
exist).
-Peff
