On Wednesday 14. September 2011, Linus Torvalds wrote:

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 4:03 AM, Matthieu Moy

[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Would the notes mechanism be able to annotate ref names instead of
commit sha1?

That would be a horrible, horrible notion.

It's quite common to have multiple branches with the same SHA1. It
might be in the "experimental-development" branch, but it got through
testing with flying colors and deemed to be stable, so it got
upgraded to the "for-linus" branch, and there hasn't been any other
development since. So now both "for-linus" and
"experimental-development" are the same commit, but they are very
much not the same branch!

So no, don't confuse branch *contents* with branch *descriptions*.

I don't think the suggestion was about annotating the branch tip as a 
way of describing the branch. Rather, you create a _new_ SHA1 that 
identifies the branch (e.g. SHA1(branch_name) ), and then annotate 
_that_ SHA1. As I said, that _can_ be done with the notes 
infrastructure, but - as Ted noted - there might be better solutions to 
storing branch descriptions.


...Johan

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