Back when Git started, we used the word "head" to mean the tip of possibly multiple histories, and that is where the name of the hierarchy .git/refs/heads/ came from. But these days we call these entities "branches" in human terms, and "head" is still used to refer to the tip of the history each of these branches represent. When asking "git ls-remote" or "git show-ref" to limit their output to branches (as opposed to showing any ref), we use "--heads" for historical reasons, but give the option a more human friendly name "--branches", and demote "--heads" to the status of a deprecated synonym. This would eventually allow us to remove them at the breaking version boundary. Junio C Hamano (3): refs: call branches branches ls-remote: introduce --branches and deprecate --heads show-ref: introduce --branches and deprecate --heads Documentation/git-ls-remote.txt | 12 +++++++----- Documentation/git-show-ref.txt | 18 ++++++++++-------- builtin/ls-remote.c | 25 ++++++++++++++++++++++--- builtin/show-ref.c | 33 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++------- connect.c | 4 ++-- remote.h | 2 +- t/t1403-show-ref.sh | 22 ++++++++++++++-------- t/t5512-ls-remote.sh | 30 +++++++++++++++++++++++++----- 8 files changed, 107 insertions(+), 39 deletions(-) -- 2.45.2-404-g9eaef5822c
