Re: [PATCH v1 4/6] Expanded branch header for Porcelain Status V2

Hi Peff & Jeff ;-)

On Wed, 20 Jul 2016, Jeff King wrote:

On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 02:20:24PM -0400, Jeff Hostetler wrote:

quoted

quoted

IIRC, it happens when HEAD points to a broken ref. So something like:

   git init
   echo broken >.git/refs/heads/master

would cause resolving HEAD to return NULL.

That worked and I see "(unknown)".

This is a bit of a nit, but is there a value we'd like
to see there, such as "(unknown)" or "(broken)" or "(missing)"
in that case?  (And make it clear that this is a different
case from "(detached)".)

I'm thinking it would be nicer to always have a field
there for parsing.

My gut feeling is to err on the side of being vague, like "unknown".
This is something that _shouldn't_ ever happen, and if it does, it could
be a broken on-disk ref, a transient syscall error, or some other
weirdness. I don't think we need to get too specific in this context
(we'll likely have said something else useful on stderr already, I
think).

FWIW I think "unknown" is a nice conservative way to shrug Git's
shoulders.

When we call `git status --porcelain=v2` and read "unknown", we could
always try to find out more using additional low-level tools and/or disk
access: this is such a rare case that it does not *really* matter all that
much.

Ciao,
Dscho