Re: Commit notes workflow

On Monday 13 June 2011, Yann Dirson wrote:

We have notes merge support since a couple of releases now, but no real
example in the docs of how best to use that.  That is, no suggested
mapping of remote notes, let alone automatic setup of refspecs at clone
time.

True. I think this has been held up, partly because I (or anyone else) 
haven't found the time to work on this, and partly because we want to add 
some kind of default refspec to easily share notes between repos; the latter 
has been caught up in the discussion you refer to in [1].

Trying to setup such refspecs, I find myself puzzled:

* if I store remote notes under refs/notes (eg.
refs/notes/*:refs/notes/origin/* as fetch refspec), then a
refs/notes/*:refs/notes/origin/* push refspec will include
refs/notes/origin/*, which we obviously don't want

* if I store them outside of refs/notes (eg.
refs/notes/*:refs/remote-notes/origin/* ), then "git notes" silently
ignores them: no output nor any error message from "notes list" or
"notes merge".

Do we really want to "git notes" to ignore everything not in refs/notes/
?  I can think of 2 possibilities out of this situation:

* remove that limitation
* decide on a naming convention for remote notes, and teach "git notes"
not to ignore it

The naming convention I have proposed (in the discussion for [1]) is 

  refs/notes/*:refs/remotes/$remote/notes/*

(but it obviously depends on reorganizing the entire remote refs hierarchy)

A (minor) problem with the second possibility is that this naming
convention could evolve, eg. if we end up with something like was
proposed in [1] for 1.8.0.  Is there any real drawback with the first
suggestion ?

[1] http://marc.info/?l=git&m=129661334011986&w=4

My gut feeling is to keep some sort of limit notes refs, and if/when we get 
around to implementing my proposal in [1] (or some variation thereof), we 
will of course extend the limit to put "refs/remotes/$remote/notes/*" (or 
whatever is decided) in the same category as "refs/notes/*".

In the meantime, I'm unsure if it's a good idea to remove the limitation 
altogether (allowing notes refs everywhere), since re-introducing a limit at 
a later point will then be MUCH harder...


...Johan

-- 
Johan Herland, [off-list ref]
www.herland.net