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git symbolic-ref: documentation fix
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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>
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Michael Haggerty authored and Junio C Hamano committed Dec 8, 2011
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Showing 1 changed file with 3 additions and 6 deletions.
9 changes: 3 additions & 6 deletions Documentation/git-symbolic-ref.txt
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -43,12 +43,9 @@ In the past, `.git/HEAD` was a symbolic link pointing at
`refs/heads/master`. When we wanted to switch to another branch,
we did `ln -sf refs/heads/newbranch .git/HEAD`, and when we wanted
to find out which branch we are on, we did `readlink .git/HEAD`.
This was fine, and internally that is what still happens by
default, but on platforms that do not have working symlinks,
or that do not have the `readlink(1)` command, this was a bit
cumbersome. On some platforms, `ln -sf` does not even work as
advertised (horrors). Therefore symbolic links are now deprecated
and symbolic refs are used by default.
But symbolic links are not entirely portable, so they are now
deprecated and symbolic refs (as described above) are used by
default.

'git symbolic-ref' will exit with status 0 if the contents of the
symbolic ref were printed correctly, with status 1 if the requested
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