Reported-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Signed-off-by: Kristoffer Haugsbakk <code@khaugsbakk.name>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Terminology to call various ref-like things are getting
straightened out.
* ps/pseudo-ref-terminology:
refs: refuse to write pseudorefs
ref-filter: properly distinuish pseudo and root refs
refs: pseudorefs are no refs
refs: classify HEAD as a root ref
refs: do not check ref existence in `is_root_ref()`
refs: rename `is_special_ref()` to `is_pseudo_ref()`
refs: rename `is_pseudoref()` to `is_root_ref()`
Documentation/glossary: define root refs as refs
Documentation/glossary: clarify limitations of pseudorefs
Documentation/glossary: redefine pseudorefs as special refs
Except for the pseudorefs MERGE_HEAD and FETCH_HEAD, all refs that live
in the root of the ref hierarchy behave the exact same as normal refs.
They can be symbolic refs or direct refs and can be read, iterated over
and written via normal tooling. All of these refs are stored in the ref
backends, which further demonstrates that they are just normal refs.
Extend the definition of "ref" to also cover such root refs. The only
additional restriction for root refs is that they must conform to a
specific naming schema.
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Clarify limitations that pseudorefs have:
- They can be read via git-rev-parse(1) and similar tools.
- They are not surfaced when iterating through refs, like when using
git-for-each-ref(1). They are not refs, so iterating through refs
should not surface them.
- They cannot be written via git-update-ref(1) and related commands.
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Nowadays, Git knows about three different kinds of refs. As defined in
gitglossary(7):
- Regular refs that start with "refs/", like "refs/heads/main".
- Pseudorefs, which live in the root directory. These must have
all-caps names and must be a file that start with an object hash.
Consequently, symbolic refs are not pseudorefs because they do not
start with an object hash.
- Special refs, of which we only have "FETCH_HEAD" and "MERGE_HEAD".
This state is extremely confusing, and I would claim that most folks
don't fully understand what is what here. The current definitions also
have several problems:
- Where does "HEAD" fit in? It's not a pseudoref because it can be
a symbolic ref. It's not a regular ref because it does not start
with "refs/". And it's not a special ref, either.
- There is a strong overlap between pseudorefs and special refs. The
pseudoref section for example mentions "MERGE_HEAD", even though it
is a special ref. Is it thus both a pseudoref and a special ref?
- Why do we even need to distinguish refs that live in the root from
other refs when they behave just like a regular ref anyway?
In other words, the current state is quite a mess and leads to wild
inconsistencies without much of a good reason.
The original reason why pseudorefs were introduced is that there are
some refs that sometimes behave like a ref, even though they aren't a
ref. And we really only have two of these nowadays, namely "MERGE_HEAD"
and "FETCH_HEAD". Those files are never written via the ref backends,
but are instead written by git-fetch(1), git-pull(1) and git-merge(1).
They contain additional metadata that highlights where a ref has been
fetched from or the list of commits that have been merged.
This original intent in fact matches the definition of special refs that
we have recently introduced in 8df4c5d205 (Documentation: add "special
refs" to the glossary, 2024-01-19). Due to the introduction of the new
reftable backend we were forced to distinguish those refs more clearly
such that we don't ever try to read or write them via the reftable
backend. In the same series, we also addressed all the other cases where
we used to write those special refs via the filesystem directly, thus
circumventing the ref backend, to instead write them via the backends.
Consequently, there are no other refs left anymore which are special.
Let's address this mess and return the pseudoref terminology back to its
original intent: a ref that sometimes behave like a ref, but which isn't
really a ref because it gets written to the filesystem directly. Or in
other words, let's redefine pseudorefs to match the current definition
of special refs. As special refs and pseudorefs are now the same per
definition, we can drop the "special refs" term again. It's not exposed
to our users and thus they wouldn't ever encounter that term anyway.
Refs that live in the root of the ref hierarchy but which are not
pseudorefs will be further defined in a subsequent commit.
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The syntax for refspecs are explained in more detail in documention for
git-fetch and git-push. Give a hint to the user too look there more fore
information
Signed-off-by: Øystein Walle <oystwa@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Doc updates to clarify what an "unborn branch" means.
* jc/orphan-unborn:
orphan/unborn: fix use of 'orphan' in end-user facing messages
orphan/unborn: add to the glossary and use them consistently
To orphan is a verb that denotes the act of getting on an unborn
branch, and a few references to "orphan branch" in our documentation
are misuses of the word. They caused end-user confusion, which was
made even worse because we did not have the term defined in the
glossary document. Add entries for "unborn" branch and "orphan"
operation to the glossary, and adjust existing documentation
accordingly.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
"To dereference" and "to peel" were sometimes used in in-code
comments and documentation but without description in the glossary.
* vd/glossary-dereference-peel:
glossary: add definitions for dereference & peel
Add 'gitglossary' definitions for "dereference" (as it used for both symrefs
and objects) and "peel". These terms are used in options and documentation
throughout Git, but they are not clearly defined anywhere and the behavior
they refer to depends heavily on context. Provide explicit definitions to
clarify existing documentation to users and help contributors to use the
most appropriate terminology possible in their additions to Git.
Update other definitions in the glossary that use the term "dereference" to
link to 'def_dereference'.
Signed-off-by: Victoria Dye <vdye@github.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Git has an additional "commit graph" capability that supplements the
normal commit object's directed acyclic graph (DAG). The supplemental
commit graph file is designed for speed of access.
Describe the commit graph both from the normative DAG view point and
from the commit graph file perspective.
Also, clarify the link between the branch ref and branch tip
by linking to the `ref` glossary entry, matching this commit graph
entry.
The commit-graph file is also distinguished by its hyphenation.
Subsequent commit catches the few cases where the hyphenation of
commit-graph was missing.
Signed-off-by: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.email>
Signed-off-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
The abbreviation 'ODB' is used in the technical documentation
sections for commit-graph and parallel-checkout, along with an
'odb' option in `git-pack-redundant`, without expansion.
Use 'object database' in full, in those entries. The text has not
been reflowed to keep the changes minimal.
While in the glossary for `object` terms, add the common`oid`
abbreviation to its entry.
Signed-off-by: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.email>
Signed-off-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
We have description on "per worktree ref", but "worktree" is not
described in the glossary. We do have "working tree", though.
Casually put, a "working tree" is what your editor and compiler
interacts with. "worktree" is a mechanism to allow one or more
"working tree"s to be attached to a repository and used to check out
different commits and branches independently, which includes not
just a "working tree" but also repository metadata like HEAD, the
index to support simultaneous use of them. Historically, we used
these terms interchangeably but we have been trying to use "working
tree" when we mean it, instead of "worktree".
Most of the existing references to "working tree" in the glossary do
refer primarily to the working tree portion, except for one that
said refs like HEAD and refs/bisect/* are per "working tree", but it
is more precise to say they are per "worktree".
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The text was somewhat confusing between the revision itself and the author.
Signed-off-by: Reuven Yagel <robi@post.jce.ac.il>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The old phrasing is at least questionable, if not wrong, as there are
a lot of branches out there that didn't see active development for
years, yet they are still branches, ready to become active again any
time.
Signed-off-by: Sergey Organov <sorganov@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
"Can not" suggests one has the option to not do something, whereas
"cannot" more strongly suggests something is disallowed or impossible.
Noticed "can not", mistakenly used instead of "cannot" in git help
glossary, then ran git grep 'can not' and found many other instances.
Only files in the Documentation folder were modified.
'Can not' also occurs in some source code comments and some test
assertion messages, and there is an error message and translation "can
not move directory into itself" which I may fix and submit separately
from the documentation change.
Also noticed and fixed "is does" in git help fetch, but there are no
other occurrences of that typo according to git grep.
Signed-off-by: Mark Rushakoff <mark.rushakoff@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Add a definition for what overlay means in the context of git, to
clarify the recently introduced overlay-mode in git checkout.
Helped-by: Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
Helped-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gummerer <t.gummerer@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
This lets us use :(attr) with "git grep <tree-ish>" or "git log".
:(attr) requires another round of checking before we can declare that
a path is matched. This is done after path matching since we have lots
of optimization to take a shortcut when things don't match.
Note that if :(attr) is present, we can't return
all_entries_interesting / all_entries_not_interesting anymore because
we can't be certain about that. Not until match_pathspec_attrs() can
tell us "yes all these paths satisfy :(attr)".
Second note. Even though we walk a specific tree, we use attributes
from _worktree_ (or falling back to the index), not from .gitattributes
files on that tree. This by itself is not necessarily wrong, but the
user just have to be aware of this.
Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Signed-off-by: Ville Skyttä <ville.skytta@iki.fi>
Reviewed-by: Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Even though "direct ancestor" is not defined in the glossary, the
common meaning of the term is simply "parent", parents being the only
direct ancestors, and the rest of ancestors being indirect ancestors.
As "parent" is obviously wrong in this place in the description, we
should simply say "ancestor", as everywhere else.
Signed-off-by: Sergey Organov <sorganov@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The ability to exclude paths with a negative pathspec is not mentioned
in the man pages for git grep and other commands where it might be
useful.
Add an example and a pointer to the pathspec glossary entry in the man
page for git grep to help the user to discover this ability.
Add similar pointers from the git-add and git-status man pages.
Additionally,
- Add a test for the behaviour when multiple exclusions are present.
- Add a test for the ^ alias.
- Improve name of existing test.
- Improve grammar in glossary description of the exclude pathspec.
Helped-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Signed-off-by: Manav Rathi <mnvrth@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The pathspec mechanism is extended via the new
":(attr:eol=input)pattern/to/match" syntax to filter paths so that it
requires paths to not just match the given pattern but also have the
specified attrs attached for them to be chosen.
Based on a patch by Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Brandon Williams <bmwill@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Instead of erroring out and telling the user that they should add a
positive pattern that covers everything else, just _do_ that.
For commands where we honor the current cwd by default (ie grep, ls-files
etc), we make that default positive pathspec be the current working
directory. And for commands that default to the whole project (ie diff,
log, etc), the default positive pathspec is the whole project.
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The choice of '!' for a negative pathspec ends up not only not matching
what we do for revisions, it's also a horrible character for shell
expansion since it needs quoting.
So add '^' as an alternative alias for an excluding pathspec entry.
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Drop a few old "todo" items by deciding that the change one of them
suggests is not such a good idea, and doing the change the other
one suggested to do.
* ss/user-manual:
user-manual: add addition gitweb information
user-manual: add section documenting shallow clones
glossary: define the term shallow clone
user-manual: remove temporary branch entry from todo list
There are several places in the documentation that
the term shallow clone is used. Defining the term
enables its use elsewhere with a known definition.
Signed-off-by: Stephen P. Smith <ischis2@cox.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
We need the place we stick refs for bisects in progress to not be
shared between worktrees. So we make the refs/bisect/ hierarchy
per-worktree.
The is_per_worktree_ref function and associated docs learn that
refs/bisect/ is per-worktree, as does the git_path code in path.c
The ref-packing functions learn that per-worktree refs should not be
packed (since packed-refs is common rather than per-worktree).
Since refs/bisect is per-worktree, logs/refs/bisect should be too.
Signed-off-by: David Turner <dturner@twopensource.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Add glossary entries for both concepts.
Pseudorefs and per-worktree refs do not yet have special handling,
because the files refs backend already handles them correctly. Later,
we will make the LMDB backend call out to the files backend to handle
per-worktree refs.
Signed-off-by: David Turner <dturner@twopensource.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Noticed-by: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org>
Helped-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Signed-off-by: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
In addition to fixing trivial and obvious typos, be careful about
the following points:
- Spell ASCII, URL and CRC in ALL CAPS;
- Spell Linux as Capitalized;
- Do not omit periods in "i.e." and "e.g.".
Signed-off-by: Thomas Ackermann <th.acker@arcor.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Re-word the section on "Updating a repository with git fetch" in the
user manual.
Various other minor fixes in the manual and glossary.
Signed-off-by: Jeremiah Mahler <jmmahler@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
"**" means bold in ASCIIDOC, so we need to escape it. This is similar
to 8447dc8 (gitignore.txt: fix documentation of "**" patterns -
2013-11-07)
Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
We liberally use "committish" and "commit-ish" (and "treeish" and
"tree-ish"); as these are non-words, let's unify these terms to
their dashed form. More importantly, clarify the documentation on
object peeling using these terms.
* rh/ishes-doc:
glossary: fix and clarify the definition of 'ref'
revisions.txt: fix and clarify <rev>^{<type>}
glossary: more precise definition of tree-ish (a.k.a. treeish)
use 'commit-ish' instead of 'committish'
use 'tree-ish' instead of 'treeish'
glossary: define commit-ish (a.k.a. committish)
glossary: mention 'treeish' as an alternative to 'tree-ish'
A tree-ish isn't a ref. Also, mention dereferencing, and that a
commit dereferences to a tree, to support gitrevisions(7) and
rev-parse's error messages.
Signed-off-by: Richard Hansen <rhansen@bbn.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Kristoffer Haugsbakk