Suppose you are managing many maintenance tracks in your project,
and some of the more recent ones are maint-2.36 and maint-2.37.
Further imagine that your project recently tagged the official 2.38
release, which means you would need to start maint-2.38 track soon,
by doing:
$ git checkout -b maint-2.38 v2.38.0^0
$ git branch --list 'maint-2.3[6-9]'
* maint-2.38
maint-2.36
maint-2.37
So far, so good. But it also is reasonable to want not to have to
worry about which maintenance track is the latest, by pointing a
more generic-sounding 'maint' branch at it, by doing:
$ git symbolic-ref refs/heads/maint refs/heads/maint-2.38
which would allow you to say "whichever it is, check out the latest
maintenance track", by doing:
$ git checkout maint
$ git branch --show-current
maint-2.38
It is arguably better to say that we are on 'maint-2.38' rather than
on 'maint', and "git merge/pull" would record "into maint-2.38" and
not "into maint", so I think what we have is a good behaviour.
One thing that is slightly irritating, however, is that I do not
think there is a good way (other than "cat .git/HEAD") to learn that
you checked out 'maint' to get into that state. Just like the output
of "git branch --show-current" shows above, "git symbolic-ref HEAD"
would report 'refs/heads/maint-2.38', bypassing the intermediate
symbolic ref at 'refs/heads/maint' that is pointed at by HEAD.
The internal resolve_ref() API already has the necessary support for
stopping after resolving a single level of a symbolic-ref, and we
can expose it by adding a "--[no-]recurse" option to the command.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
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