Re: [PATCH] git-for-each-ref: add new field name "symbolic"

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 11:45:50PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Larry D'Anna <larry@elder-gods.org> writes:
> 
> > %(symbolic) will expand to "true" for symbolic refs, and "false" otherwise.
> > This is a lot faster than calling git-symbolic-ref on every single ref from your
> > shell script.
> 
> I think this is a good idea, but I suspect that much more than half of
> people who iterate over for-each-ref output and run symbolic-ref would
> actually want to learn what actual ref a symbolic one points at.  So you
> may not be helping as much people as you could by going in this direction.
> 
> Instead of expanding to "true", why not make it show the expansion if it
> is symbolic, and to empty if it is not?

That was my first thought, too. Unfortunately it needs some pretty heavy
refactoring of the for_each_ref call chain, as we throw away the
dereferenced ref name at the very bottom.

So while I would be in favor of a real "%(symbolic)" as you describe, it
is significantly more work. If we are just going to do a flag check,
though, I would much rather see it called "%(issymbolic)" or something
so that "%(symbolic)" can be used later for the actual value.

One other alternative would be to simply expose "%(flags)" which would
expand to nothing, "symbolic", "packed", or "symbolic,packed".

-Peff