builtin/show-ref: add new mode to check for reference existence

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>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions