On Wed, Jan 03, 2024 at 04:52:36PM +0100, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:

On Wed, Jan 03, 2024 at 10:45:49AM -0500, Taylor Blau wrote:

quoted

On Wed, Jan 03, 2024 at 09:52:33AM +0100, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:

quoted

quoted

I tend to agree that the special empty pattern would be a good shorthand
for listing all references underneath refs/, including any top-level
psuedo-refs.

But I don't think that I quite follow what Karthik is saying here.
for-each-ref returns the union of references that match the given
pattern(s), not their intersection. So if you wanted to list just the
psudo-refs ending in '_HEAD', you'd do:

  $ git for-each-ref "*_HEAD"

I think if you wanted to list all pseudo-refs, calling the option
`--pseudo-refs` seems reasonable. But if you want to list some subset of
psueod-refs matching a given pattern, you should specify that pattern
directly.

Where I think this proposal falls short is if you have refs outside of
the "refs/" hierarchy. Granted, this is nothing that should usually
happen nowadays. But I think we should safeguard us for the future:

Hmm. Maybe I misspoke, but I was thinking that `--pseudo-refs` would
imply that we list all references (regardless of whether they appear in
the top-level refs/ hierarchy). But perhaps I'm misunderstanding what
you're trying to accomplish here.

Ah, okay. I think in that case it's simply a misunderstanding. To me a
pseudo-ref only includes refs that match `is_pseudoref_syntax()`, so
things like "HEAD", "ORIG_HEAD" or "MERGE_HEAD". So with that
understanding, a ref "something/outside/refs" would not be included,
but I'd very much like to see it listed.

OK, I see: you're trying to add an option that lists all references
(including those outside of the top-level "refs/" hierarchy). But my
proposal to use `--pseudo-refs` was to list *just* those references
outside of the top-level hierarchy.

I wonder if we might want to do something else entirely, which is an
option which controls the top-level "namespace" of references that we
want to see. The behavior would then be to list all references under
"namespace" (which presumably would be "refs/" by default).

If you want to list references like something/outside/refs, your
namespace would then be --namespace="".

I think that this would be a bit more flexible than the current
suggestions, but I am also not as familiar as you are at this particular
problem :-).

Thanks,
Taylor