peel_onion(): add support for <rev>^{tag}

Complete the <rev>^{<type>} family of object descriptors by having
<rev>^{tag} dereference <rev> until a tag object is found (or fail if
unable).

At first glance this may not seem very useful, as commits, trees, and
blobs cannot be peeled to a tag, and a tag would just peel to itself.
However, this can be used to ensure that <rev> names a tag object:

    $ git rev-parse --verify v1.8.4^{tag}
    04f013dc38d7512eadb915eba22efc414f18b869
    $ git rev-parse --verify master^{tag}
    error: master^{tag}: expected tag type, but the object dereferences to tree type
    fatal: Needed a single revision

Users can already ensure that <rev> is a tag object by checking the
output of 'git cat-file -t <rev>', but:
  * users may expect <rev>^{tag} to exist given that <rev>^{commit},
    <rev>^{tree}, and <rev>^{blob} all exist
  * this syntax is more convenient/natural in some circumstances

Signed-off-by: Richard Hansen <rhansen@bbn.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/revisions.txt b/Documentation/revisions.txt
index d477b3f6bc..b3322adf24 100644
--- a/Documentation/revisions.txt
+++ b/Documentation/revisions.txt
@@ -121,6 +121,9 @@ some output processing may assume ref names in UTF-8.
 object that exists, without requiring 'rev' to be a tag, and
 without dereferencing 'rev'; because a tag is already an object,
 it does not have to be dereferenced even once to get to an object.
++
+'rev{caret}\{tag\}' can be used to ensure that 'rev' identifies an
+existing tag object.
 
 '<rev>{caret}\{\}', e.g. 'v0.99.8{caret}\{\}'::
   A suffix '{caret}' followed by an empty brace pair