Re: git symbolic-ref vs. reflog (vs. rebase)

[Csaba Henk <csaba@lowlife.hu>]

On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 4:30 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
>
>> I think every caller should be using "-m" these days.  I know we can't
>> _require_ it for historical reasons. But shouldn't symbolic-ref always
>> write a reflog entry? Even something like "we changed and I can't tell
>> you why" to cover older scripts that call symbolic-ref?
>
> I think the particular instance Csaba saw in rebase may want to pass the
> reason why it flipped the HEAD.
>
> Flipping HEAD temporarily to another ref to do something, only to flip it
> back before giving the control back to the user, might be something a
> script may want to have a choice of not logging, so I am mildly negative
> on changing the command to unconditionally log empty entry without being
> told.
>
> "update-ref" seems to write an empty entry even when not given an "-m"
> option, and we can view it as robbing a similar choice from the scripts.
> We might want to fix it.  I dunno.

What if symbolic-ref and/or update-ref were changed so that the default
invocation would add a reflog entry with a default (empty?) note, however,
also provide an option with which suppressing the reflog can be requested?

Csaba