Re: [PATCH 0/6] A handful of "branch description" patches

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

Eww. :)

This seems like a clever solution to making git-notes store a ref as a
key instead of an arbitrary sha1. But I wonder if the end result is
really waht the user wants.

A more fundamental issue I have with this is that names of the refs are
local by nature (what I call "master" branch is not "master" to you, but
rather it is "origin/master" or "jch/master") while notes is meant to be
the mechanism to share. The following shares the same issue, but at least
it does not abuse "notes", so in that sense it may be cleaner at the
design level...

Wouldn't it be much more friendly to have a separate tree of refnames
that stores:

  refs/heads/foo -> (some blob with the "foo" description)
  refs/heads/bar -> (some blob with the "bar" description)

Yeah, you have to build another git-notes-like interface around it. But
the data structure is pleasant and flexible. You could even "git
checkout" the whole tree and edit the notes with your editor, without
having to deal with some obfuscated name.

On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 01:52:10PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

A more fundamental issue I have with this is that names of the refs are
local by nature (what I call "master" branch is not "master" to you, but
rather it is "origin/master" or "jch/master") while notes is meant to be
the mechanism to share. The following shares the same issue, but at least
it does not abuse "notes", so in that sense it may be cleaner at the
design level...

Good point. For that reason, your config-based solution perhaps makes
more sense.

-Peff