While we have multiple ways to show the value of a given reference, we
do not have any way to check whether a reference exists at all. While
commands like git-rev-parse(1) or git-show-ref(1) can be used to check
for reference existence in case the reference resolves to something
sane, neither of them can be used to check for existence in some other
scenarios where the reference does not resolve cleanly:
- References which have an invalid name cannot be resolved.
- References to nonexistent objects cannot be resolved.
- Dangling symrefs can be resolved via git-symbolic-ref(1), but this
requires the caller to special case existence checks depending on
whether or not a reference is symbolic or direct.
Furthermore, git-rev-list(1) and other commands do not let the caller
distinguish easily between an actually missing reference and a generic
error.
Taken together, this seems like sufficient motivation to introduce a
separate plumbing command to explicitly check for the existence of a
reference without trying to resolve its contents.
This new command comes in the form of `git show-ref --exists`. This
new mode will exit successfully when the reference exists, with a
specific exit code of 2 when it does not exist, or with 1 when there
has been a generic error.
Note that the only way to properly implement this command is by using
the internal `refs_read_raw_ref()` function. While the public function
`refs_resolve_ref_unsafe()` can be made to behave in the same way by
passing various flags, it does not provide any way to obtain the errno
with which the reference backend failed when reading the reference. As
such, it becomes impossible for us to distinguish generic errors from
the explicit case where the reference wasn't found.
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The synopsis treats the `--verify` and the implicit mode the same. They
are slightly different though:
- They accept different sets of flags.
- The implicit mode accepts patterns while the `--verify` mode
accepts references.
Split up the synopsis for these two modes such that we can disambiguate
those differences.
While at it, drop "--quiet" from the pattern mode's synopsis. It does
not make a lot of sense to list patterns, but squelch the listing output
itself. The description for "--quiet" is adapted accordingly.
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
When commit 00bf685975 (show-ref doc: update for internal consistency,
2023-05-19) switched from double quotes to backticks around our {caret}
macro, we started rendering "{caret}" literally. Fix this by replacing
by a "^" character.
Signed-off-by: Martin Ågren <martin.agren@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
- Use inline-code syntax for options where appropriate.
- Use code blocks to clarify output format.
- Use 'OID' (for 'object ID') instead of 'SHA-1' as we support
different hashing algorithms these days.
Signed-off-by: Sean Allred <allred.sean@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The whitespace padding of alternatives should be of the form "[-f |
--force]" not "[-f|--force]". Likewise we should not have padding
before the first option, so "(--all | <pack-filename>...)" is correct,
not "( --all | <pack-filename>... )".
Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
When the explanatory text uses the term "respectively", the order of
flags is important.
Signed-off-by: Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
When formatted as a man page, 1st section header is always in upper
case even if we write it otherwise. Make all 1st section headers
uppercase to keep it close to the final output.
This does affect html since case is kept there, but I still think it's
a good idea to maintain a consistent style for 1st section headers.
Some sections perhaps should become second sections instead, where
case is kept, and for better organization. I will update if anyone has
suggestions about this.
While at there I also make some header more consistent (e.g. examples
vs example) and fix a couple minor things here and there.
Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Similarly to the previous commit, use backquotes instead of
forward-quotes, for long options.
This was obtained with:
perl -pi -e "s/'(--[a-z][a-z=<>-]*)'/\`\$1\`/g" *.txt
and manual tweak to remove false positive in ascii-art (o'--o'--o' to
describe rewritten history).
Signed-off-by: Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@imag.fr>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The synopsys text and the usage string of subcommands that read list
of things from the standard input are often shown like this:
git gostak [--distim] < <list-of-doshes>
This is problematic in a number of ways:
* The way to use these commands is more often to feed them the
output from another command, not feed them from a file.
* Manual pages outside Git, commands that operate on the data read
from the standard input, e.g "sort", "grep", "sed", etc., are not
described with such a "< redirection-from-file" in their synopsys
text. Our doing so introduces inconsistency.
* We do not insist on where the output should go, by saying
git gostak [--distim] < <list-of-doshes> > <output>
* As it is our convention to enclose placeholders inside <braket>,
the redirection operator followed by a placeholder filename
becomes very hard to read, both in the documentation and in the
help text.
Let's clean them all up, after making sure that the documentation
clearly describes the modes that take information from the standard
input and what kind of things are expected on the input.
[jc: stole example for fmt-merge-msg from Jonathan]
Helped-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Add cross-references between the manpages for git-for-each-ref(1) and
git-show-ref(1).
Signed-off-by: Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The "--head" option to "git show-ref" was only to add "HEAD" to the
list of candidate refs to be filtered by the usual rules
(e.g. "--heads" that only show refs under refs/heads). Change the
meaning of the option to always show "HEAD" regardless of what
filtering will be applied to any other ref (this is a backward
incompatible change, so I may need to add an entry to the Release
Notes).
* db/show-ref-head:
show-ref: make --head always show the HEAD ref
The docs seem to say that doing
git show-ref --head --tags
would show both the HEAD ref and all the tag refs. However, doing
both --head and either of --tags or --heads would filter out the HEAD
ref.
Also update the documentation to describe the new behavior and add
tests for the show-ref command.
[jc: Doug did proofread the tests, but it was done by me and bugs in
it are mine].
Signed-off-by: Doug Bell <madcityzen@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Use "SHA-1" instead of "SHA1" whenever we talk about the hash function.
When used as a programming symbol, we keep "SHA1".
Signed-off-by: Thomas Ackermann <th.acker@arcor.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
In asciidoc 7, backticks like `foo` produced a typographic
effect, but did not otherwise affect the syntax. In asciidoc
8, backticks introduce an "inline literal" inside which markup
is not interpreted. To keep compatibility with existing
documents, asciidoc 8 has a "no-inline-literal" attribute to
keep the old behavior. We enabled this so that the
documentation could be built on either version.
It has been several years now, and asciidoc 7 is no longer
in wide use. We can now decide whether or not we want
inline literals on their own merits, which are:
1. The source is much easier to read when the literal
contains punctuation. You can use `master~1` instead
of `master{tilde}1`.
2. They are less error-prone. Because of point (1), we
tend to make mistakes and forget the extra layer of
quoting.
This patch removes the no-inline-literal attribute from the
Makefile and converts every use of backticks in the
documentation to an inline literal (they must be cleaned up,
or the example above would literally show "{tilde}" in the
output).
Problematic sites were found by grepping for '`.*[{\\]' and
examined and fixed manually. The results were then verified
by comparing the output of "html2text" on the set of
generated html pages. Doing so revealed that in addition to
making the source more readable, this patch fixes several
formatting bugs:
- HTML rendering used the ellipsis character instead of
literal "..." in code examples (like "git log A...B")
- some code examples used the right-arrow character
instead of '->' because they failed to quote
- api-config.txt did not quote tilde, and the resulting
HTML contained a bogus snippet like:
<tt><sub></tt> foo <tt></sub>bar</tt>
which caused some parsers to choke and omit whole
sections of the page.
- git-commit.txt confused ``foo`` (backticks inside a
literal) with ``foo'' (matched double-quotes)
- mentions of `A U Thor <author@example.com>` used to
erroneously auto-generate a mailto footnote for
author@example.com
- the description of --word-diff=plain incorrectly showed
the output as "[-removed-] and {added}", not "{+added+}".
- using "prime" notation like:
commit `C` and its replacement `C'`
confused asciidoc into thinking that everything between
the first backtick and the final apostrophe were meant
to be inside matched quotes
- asciidoc got confused by the escaping of some of our
asterisks. In particular,
`credential.\*` and `credential.<url>.\*`
properly escaped the asterisk in the first case, but
literally passed through the backslash in the second
case.
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Two "^" characters were incorrectly being interpreted as markup for
superscripting. Fix them by writing them as attribute references
"{caret}".
Although a single "^" character in a paragraph cannot be
misinterpreted in this way, also write other "^" characters as
"{caret}" in the interest of good hygiene (unless they are in literal
paragraphs, of course, in which context attribute references are not
recognized).
Spell "{}" consistently, namely *not* quoted as "\{\}". Since the
braces are empty, they cannot be interpreted as an attribute
reference, and either spelling is OK. So arbitrarily choose one
variation and use it consistently.
Signed-off-by: Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The point of these sections is generally to:
1. Give credit where it is due.
2. Give the reader an idea of where to ask questions or
file bug reports.
But they don't do a good job of either case. For (1), they
are out of date and incomplete. A much more accurate answer
can be gotten through shortlog or blame. For (2), the
correct contact point is generally git@vger, and even if you
wanted to cc the contact point, the out-of-date and
incomplete fields mean you're likely sending to somebody
useless.
So let's drop the fields entirely from all manpages except
git(1) itself. We already point people to the mailing list
for bug reports there, and we can update the Authors section
to give credit to the major contributors and point to
shortlog and blame for more information.
Each page has a "This is part of git" footer, so people can
follow that to the main git manpage.
git-show-ref really does not do what one would expect under the name
pattern matching, so describe it.
Signed-off-by: Michael J Gruber <git@drmicha.warpmail.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
I am not sure why, but the regular expression "(?:\^\{\})" gets
rendered by asciidoc as "(?:\{})". The intent seems to be a regex
matching the literal string "^{}", so this rewrites the markup to
produce "(?:\^{})" as output.
Cc: Julian Phillips <julian@quantumfyre.co.uk>
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
A peek at where the refs are kept might help understanding, even if,
as the DESCRIPTION section suggests, direct access is not part of the
public API.
Balance that out with a pointer to update-ref.
Suggested-by: Geoff Russell <geoffrey.russell@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Specifying one or more <pattern> parameters is optional when calling
show-ref, so mark them as such using brackets in the manual.
Signed-off-by: Holger Weiß <holger@zedat.fu-berlin.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The documentation was quite inconsistent when spelling 'git cmd' if it
only refers to the program, not to some specific invocation syntax:
both 'git-cmd' and 'git cmd' spellings exist.
The current trend goes towards dashless forms, and there is precedent
in 647ac70 (git-svn.txt: stop using dash-form of commands.,
2009-07-07) to actively eliminate the dashed variants.
Replace 'git-cmd' with 'git cmd' throughout, except where git-shell,
git-cvsserver, git-upload-pack, git-receive-pack, and
git-upload-archive are concerned, because those really live in the
$PATH.
This only changes the behavior of "git show-ref -h" without any
other options and arguments.
"show-ref -h" currently is short for "show-ref --head", which
shows all the refs/* and HEAD, as opposed to "show-ref" that
shows all the refs/* and not HEAD.
Does anybody use "show-ref -h"? It was in Linus's original, most
likely only because "it might be handy", not because "the command
should not show the HEAD by default for such and such reasons".
So I think it is okay if "show-ref -h" (but not "show-ref
--head") gives help and exits.
If a current script uses "git show-ref -h" without any other
arguments, it would have to be adapted by changing "-h" to
"--head".
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Also make the docs more consistent with the usage message. While we're
here remove the zero initializers from the static variables as they're
unnecessary.
Signed-off-by: Stephen Boyd <bebarino@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Under is better than in because of the nested nature of the .git
directory.
"also using" sounds a little odd, plus we say combined with later on so
just use that.
Signed-off-by: Stephen Boyd <bebarino@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
When the SYNOPSIS says e.g. "<path>...", it is nice if the DESCRIPTION
also mentions "<path>..." and says the specified "paths" (note plural)
are used for $whatever. This fixes the obvious mismatches.
Signed-off-by: Abhijit Menon-Sen <ams@toroid.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The names of git commands are not meant to be entered at the
commandline; they are just names. So we render them in italics,
as is usual for command names in manpages.
Using
doit () {
perl -e 'for (<>) { s/\`(git-[^\`.]*)\`/'\''\1'\''/g; print }'
}
for i in git*.txt config.txt diff*.txt blame*.txt fetch*.txt i18n.txt \
merge*.txt pretty*.txt pull*.txt rev*.txt urls*.txt
do
doit <"$i" >"$i+" && mv "$i+" "$i"
done
git diff
.
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@uchicago.edu>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Following what appears to be the predominant style, format
names of commands and commandlines both as `teletype text`.
While we're at it, add articles ("a" and "the") in some
places, italicize the name of the command in the manual page
synopsis line, and add a comma or two where it seems appropriate.
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@uchicago.edu>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Since the git-* commands are not installed in $(bindir), using
"git-command <parameters>" in examples in the documentation is
not a good idea. On the other hand, it is nice to be able to
refer to each command using one hyphenated word. (There is no
escaping it, anyway: man page names cannot have spaces in them.)
This patch retains the dash in naming an operation, command,
program, process, or action. Complete command lines that can
be entered at a shell (i.e., without options omitted) are
made to use the dashless form.
The changes consist only of replacing some spaces with hyphens
and vice versa. After a "s/ /-/g", the unpatched and patched
versions are identical.
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@uchicago.edu>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The OPTIONS section of a documentation file contains a list
of the options a git command accepts.
Currently there are several variants to describe the case that
different options (almost) do the same in the OPTIONS section.
Some are:
-f, --foo::
-f|--foo::
-f | --foo::
But AsciiDoc has the special form:
-f::
--foo::
This patch applies this form to the documentation of the whole git suite,
and removes useless em-dash prevention, so \--foo becomes --foo.
Signed-off-by: Stephan Beyer <s-beyer@gmx.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
As the "git" man page describes the "git" command at the end-user
level, it seems better to move it to man section 1.
Signed-off-by: Christian Couder <chriscool@tuxfamily.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Between AsciiDoc 8.2.2 and 8.2.3, the following change was made to the stock
Asciidoc configuration:
@@ -149,7 +153,10 @@
# Inline macros.
# Backslash prefix required for escape processing.
# (?s) re flag for line spanning.
-(?su)[\\]?(?P<name>\w(\w|-)*?):(?P<target>\S*?)(\[(?P<attrlist>.*?)\])=
+
+# Explicit so they can be nested.
+(?su)[\\]?(?P<name>(http|https|ftp|file|mailto|callto|image|link)):(?P<target>\S*?)(\[(?P<attrlist>.*?)\])=
+
# Anchor: [[[id]]]. Bibliographic anchor.
(?su)[\\]?\[\[\[(?P<attrlist>[\w][\w-]*?)\]\]\]=anchor3
# Anchor: [[id,xreflabel]]
This default regex now matches explicit values, and unfortunately in this
case gitlink was being matched by just 'link', causing the wrong inline
macro template to be applied. By renaming the macro, we can avoid being
matched by the wrong regex.
Signed-off-by: Dan McGee <dpmcgee@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Now that 'git peek-remote' is deprecated and only an alias for
'git ls-remote', it should not be referenced from other manual pages.
This also removes the description of the --exec option, which is no
longer present.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Sixt <johannes.sixt@telecom.at>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Use the comment in the code to document the --exclude-existing
function to git-show-ref.
Signed-off-by: Julian Phillips <julian@quantumfyre.co.uk>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
