resolveRef cannot find HEAD~1

I am using isomorphic-git 1.7.8 (aka the latest published version at the time of writing) with Node. I get the error below when passing HEAD~1 as ref to the function resolveRef.

NotFoundError: Could not find HEAD~1.

Since the ref is passed as a command-line argument to my tool, a workaround is to fall back on git and pass $(git rev-parse HEAD~1) from the shell. But this is obviously not ideal…

Thank you for your support and for this great library!

[jcubic]

I think it will be really hard to make it right. there are lot of references in git you can use a lot of different syntaxes. You would need to have a parser to implement them all. To give you perspective there are ^ that pick the branch if this is a merged branch. So you can use funky stuff like HEAD~2^1 and you probably I didn’t test combine ^ and ~ into the longer chain.

This is just an edge case that will need to complicate the library too much and it’s not worth it. if something will need ^ he will need to implement this herself. And it can be added into docs if something need this.

I prefer to document this as separated code where I show how to implement single HEAD~2^2 and someone wants more he can implement a full parser on top of isomorphic-git.

Actually, I can implement this in my project Git Web Terminal which is a better place for something like this. If I ever implement HEAD .. ^ I probably be the only project that uses this.

[mmkal]

@jcubic would you be open to pull request adding something like the above to the library? Btw, thank you for picking development back up!