Re: [PATCH v3 2/6] notes: replace pseudorefs with real refs

Johan Herland [off-list ref] writes:

Yes, almost. There are some complications with the concept of
"checking out" a notes tree:

 - The notes tree fanout must be flattened (so that when merging two
note trees with different fanout, conflicting notes (e.g. deadbeef...
and de/adbeef....) are turned into a file-level conflict in the notes
merge worktree (i.e. contents with conflict markers in
.git/NOTES_MERGE_WORKTREE/deadbeef...).

True.  I however think Michael was envisioning further into the
future, where the tree-level merges would take care of that detail
and populate the index to express conflicts using "canonicalised"
paths, removing these fan-out slashes, before externalising the
conflicted paths that need user's attention on the filesystem.

 - Notes trees may be very large (e.g. one note per commit for the
entire project history), so we want to avoid checking out as many
notes as possible. Currently we only checkout the notes that actually
do conflict, and keep the rest referenced from NOTES_MERGE_PARTIAL.

This is a valid point, but nobody forces us to do a full checkout to
perform a merge.  From day one, our merge machinery is prepared to
merge in an empty working tree, only checking out paths that need to
be modified by the merge.

quoted

* This would allow multiple notes merges to take place at the same time
provided they target different merge references.

* This would prevent multiple notes merges to the same notes reference
at the same time by the same mechanism that prevents the same branch
from being checked out in two linked worktrees at the same time.

It's just a thought; I have no idea whether it is practical...

I'm not sure whether it's worth trying to reuse the same linked
worktree mechanism for notes trees, when (a) the concept of "checking
out" a notes tree is so different, as explained above, and (b)
currently the only use case for a notes worktree is during a notes
merge.

I have a very similar feeling except that I'd replace "linked
worktree mechanism" with "checkout mechanism".  If we were to
introduce such a new checkout mechanism that flattens a fan-out
paths, with "sparse checkout"-like behaviour, the current "checkout
mechanism" would not be reused, but the resulting system would
benefit from "linked worktree mechanism" just as much as the normal
multiple worktree layout benefits from it.  You'd want to make sure
only one such worktree has the checkout of one refs/notes/* ref,
everything in refs/* is shared across the repository and its
worktrees, and certain things like MERGE_HEAD and the index inside
$GIT_DIR/ are not shared, which are what the linked worktree
mechanism gives us.