On Mon, Nov 06, 2023 at 06:48:29PM -0800, Victoria Dye wrote:

Junio C Hamano wrote:

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"Victoria Dye via GitGitGadget" [off-list ref] writes:

[snip]

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 * I'm not attached to '--full-deref' as a name - if someone has an idea for
   a more descriptive name, please suggest it!

Another candidate verb may be "to peel", and I have no strong
opinion between it and "to dereference".  But I have a mild aversion
to an abbreviation that is not strongly established.

Makes sense. I got the "deref" abbreviation for 'update-ref --no-deref', but
'show-ref' has a "--dereference" option and protocol v2's "ls-refs" includes
a "peel" arg. "Dereference" is the term already used in the 'for-each-ref'
documentation, though, so if no one comes in with an especially strong
opinion on this I'll change the option to '--full-dereference'. Thanks!

But doesn't dereferencing in the context of git-update-ref(1) refer to
something different? It's not about tags, but it is about symbolic
references and whether we want to update the symref or the pointee. But
true enough, in git-show-ref(1) "dereference" actually means that we
should peel the tag.

To me it feels like preexisting commands are confused already. In my
mind model:

    - "peel" means that an object gets resolved to one of its pointees.
      This also includes the case here, where a tag gets peeled to its
      pointee.

    - "dereference" means that a symbolic reference gets resolved to its
      pointee. This matches what we do in `git update-ref --no-deref`.

But after reading through the code I don't think we distinguish those
terms cleanly throughout our codebase. Still, "peeling" feels like a
better match in my opinion.

Patrick