Re: [PATCH] show-ref: add --unresolved option

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, Mar 06, 2024 at 08:31:15AM +0100, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:

> Yeah, the proposed patch basically aims to do the above chained command
> in an easier way. I think that this would be a nice addition to make
> this easier to use and better discoverable. But in the long run what I
> think would be really useful is to extend git-for-each-ref(1) and/or
> git-show-ref(1) so that they can print all existing refs with their
> direct values. Right now, it's impossible to get a globally consistent
> view of all refs in the refdb with their unresolved values.

Yeah, it seems like if this were a format-specifier for for-each-ref it
would be a lot more flexible.

You can do:

  git for-each-ref --format='%(refname) %(objectname) %(symref)'

to get the resolved values next to the symrefs (if any). I think that
does a full resolution, though (so again, if you had one->two->three,
you can never learn about the intermediate "two").

> That will end up a bit more involved though. The ref iterators we have
> right now do not provide any way to return symref targets to the caller,
> so we would have to first extend the interfaces and adapt both backends
> to support this. But this is kind of where I want to end up.

I think for-each-ref in the above command works by calling
resolve_refdup() itself, and then recording the result. It would be nice
to get it from the iterator, though (more efficient, and avoids any
races).

-Peff