DIY_GIT_in_Python/how_to/Change_34.md

• data: Don’t always dereference refs (for ugit k)

Actually, it’s not always desirable to dereference a ref all the way. Sometimes we would like to know at which ref a symbolic ref points, rather than the final OID. Or we would like to update a ref directly, rather then updating the last ref in the chain.

One such usecase is ugit k. When visualizing refs it would be nice to see which ref points to which ref. We will see another usecase soon.

To accomodate this, we will add a deref option to get_ref, iter_refs and update_ref. If they will be called with deref=False, they will work on the raw value of a ref and not dereference any symbolic refs.

Then we will update k to use deref=False.