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

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

Larry D'Anna [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

%(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