Re: [PATCH 2/4] glossary: define committish (a.k.a. commit-ish)

Richard Hansen [off-list ref] writes:

On 2013-06-19 18:36, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

Ahh.  If you had quoted [...] a few exchanges ago I would have
immediately understood what you were trying to say.

Sorry about that, my bad.

quoted

In today's world (after packed-refs was introduced), probably

	A name that begins with refs/ (e.g. refs/heads/master) that
	can point at an object name.

        The namespace of refs is hierarchical and different
        subhierarchy is used for different purposes (e.g. the
        refs/heads/ hierarchy is used to represent local branches).

is an appropriate rewrite of the above.

Some thoughts about the above definition:
  * Aren't HEAD, FETCH_HEAD, ORIG_HEAD also refs?

That is a shade of gray.  "refs" are names we use as the starting
point to construct extended SHA-1 expressions to refer to objects,
and in that sense they are.  It would be complete to mention these
as special cases.

  * That definition excludes symrefs.

True.  "... that can directly point at an object, or point at
another ref (the latter is called a symbolic ref)."

  * It may be worthwhile to mention that refs are part of the
    repository.
  * Is a ref a name?  Or is it the binding of a name to an object/ref?

I am not particularly interested in pedantry, but I think in the way
we used the word "ref", it is a name.  "refs/heads/master" is the
full name of the ref and it can be abbreviated to 'master' when not
ambiguous.  And there is a mechanism to read what the the ref has to
learn the name of the object (*not* object/ref) it refers to (the
name of that mechanism being "ref resolution").

To a layperson, a ref is one of the ways you can name an object
with.