git symbolic-ref: documentation fix
The old "git symbolic-ref" manpage seemed to imply in one place that symlinks are still the default way to represent symbolic references and in another that symlinks are deprecated. Fix the text and shorten the justification for the change of implementation. Signed-off-by: Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Michael Haggerty committed
Dec 7, 2011 at 16:20 UTC
a8d05d72b9fd60fe63f249250dcab2352b7b1984
1 file changed
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Documentation/git-symbolic-ref.txt
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@@ -43,12 +43,9 @@ In the past, `.git/HEAD` was a symbolic link pointing at
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`refs/heads/master`. When we wanted to switch to another branch,
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we did `ln -sf refs/heads/newbranch .git/HEAD`, and when we wanted
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to find out which branch we are on, we did `readlink .git/HEAD`.
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-This was fine, and internally that is what still happens by
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-default, but on platforms that do not have working symlinks,
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-or that do not have the `readlink(1)` command, this was a bit
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-cumbersome. On some platforms, `ln -sf` does not even work as
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-advertised (horrors). Therefore symbolic links are now deprecated
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-and symbolic refs are used by default.
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+But symbolic links are not entirely portable, so they are now
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+deprecated and symbolic refs (as described above) are used by
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+default.
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'git symbolic-ref' will exit with status 0 if the contents of the
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symbolic ref were printed correctly, with status 1 if the requested