Re: branch description

Michael Dressel [off-list ref] writes:

On Friday 18 April 2008, Jakub Narebski wrote:

quoted

Let me sum up here proposals where to put branch description:

[...]

what's the opinion of having a new branch object? Actually the tag
object probably already does the job? This would spoil the elegant
light weight current branch references. But tags are not that heavy.

In this approach the tags would not reference commits but tags. And
tags have annotation. The difference to the normal tags would be that
these tags are referenced from refs/heads/<branch> instead of
refs/tags.

I have no clue how involved this change would become and if the
benefit would justify the effort. I guess using proper objects for
branches would only be justified if additional advantages could be
achieved.

This won't work.  With described (annotated) branches, there are two
pieces of data associated with a branch:
 * commit it points to (branch head)
 * description of a branch

Branch head changes frequently (commit, reset, bisect, rebase), while
description should change rarely.  Those two pieces of data are
independent.  Tag object would unnecessary join/fuse those two
together.


Also, for exach commit on a branch, or for each moving of branch ref
(reset, amend, bisect), you would have to create tag object, which
would accumulate only to be garbage collected some time in the
future...

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git