+
Note that any of the 'refs/*' cases above may come either from
the '$GIT_DIR/refs' directory or from the '$GIT_DIR/packed-refs' file.
-While the ref name encoding is unspecified, UTF-8 is prefered as
+While the ref name encoding is unspecified, UTF-8 is preferred as
some output processing may assume ref names in UTF-8.
'<refname>@\{<date>\}', e.g. 'master@\{yesterday\}', 'HEAD@\{5 minutes ago\}'::
object of that type is found or the object cannot be
dereferenced anymore (in which case, barf). '<rev>{caret}0'
is a short-hand for '<rev>{caret}\{commit\}'.
++
+'rev{caret}\{object\}' can be used to make sure 'rev' names an
+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}\{\}', e.g. 'v0.99.8{caret}\{\}'::
A suffix '{caret}' followed by an empty brace pair