Re: Fwd: [Survey] Signed push

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 3:51 PM, Philip Oakley [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Is one option to store the branch description (if any) on line two of the
<branch name> file in .git\refs\heads.

Or even on line one.

We already basically do that for the magic FETCH_HEAD branch, and use
it to populate the merge commit. Extending that kind of thing to all
branches might be a nice idea.

Of course, then the question becomes "what about packed refs"? Do you
just leave the unpacked ref in place for those?

Seriously, storage format is not an issue at all and you know it.  The
semantics is.

What commands use the description and for what purpose, how it is updated
when the branch is repurposed, how it is propagated to other repositories,
if there is a situation where two descriptions need to be merged, and if
so how that merge happens, etc., etc.

We could store it in unused part of loose refs. We could add [branch
"master"] description = ...  in the .git/config. The latter would even be
easier for humans to edit by hand.

If we want to use the description when merging locally, for example,
fmt-merge-msg needs to be taught to read it, which would mean we would
need an internal API "read_branch_description()", regardless of what
storage format we choose to use. If we want to use it for "git pull", then
the transport layer needs to become aware of it.