"Kristoffer Haugsbakk" [off-list ref] writes:

On Sun, Oct 13, 2024, at 11:34, Phillip Wood wrote:

quoted

quoted

I do not think update-ref is a tool to modify a symbolic-ref.

Didn't we add support for symbolic-refs to update-ref with
'kn/update-ref-symref'? Maybe it only works with --stdin? I've Cc'd
Karthik for clarification on how it is supposed to work.

Yes.  The man page says that you can use the `symref-update` command
with `--stdin`.

That's correct, we did indeed add support for symref in the --stdin part
of `git update-ref`. To give some context, this is because we sometimes
want to update regular refs and symrefs in the same transaction. While
the underlying code exists, we didn't add support for symrefs without
--stdin, mostly because `git symbolic-ref` already exists.

So the issue or confusion here seems to be that you have to use specific
commands for symrefs.  git-update-ref(1) won’t try to figure it out.

I agree, the documentation here could use some cleanup. The confusion
here lies around

    It also allows a "ref" file to be a symbolic pointer to another ref
    file by starting with the four-byte header sequence of "ref:".

This is added to talk about how the command de-references symbolic refs,
but it can be misinterpreted to mean that it does support symbolic refs
on the top level.

Do either of you want to take a stab at updating the documentation here?

That seems in line with a plumbing command.

--
Kristoffer Haugsbakk