Re: [PATCH v2 3/3] show-ref: add --symbolic-name option

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im> writes:

> On Mon, Apr 08, 2024 at 05:38:13PM +0000, John Cai via GitGitGadget wrote:
>> From: John Cai <johncai86@gmail.com>
>> 
>> 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 teach show-ref a
>> --symbolic-name option that will cause git-show-ref(1) to print out the
>> value symbolic references points to.
>
> I think it was Peff who shared a way to achieve this without actually
> introducing a new option via `git for-each-ref --format=`. Can we maybe
> provide some benchmarks to demonstrate that this variant is preferable
> over what's already possible?

Yes, I recall that discussion, and in fact I was a bit surprised to
see that this iteration still went to the show-ref route.

Thanks for bringing it up.