Re: Feature request: flagging “volatile” branches for integration/development

On Wed, Feb 1, 2017 at 12:12 AM, Herbert, Marc [off-list ref] wrote:

(Thanks to Josh Triplett[*] for contributing to this message)

Hi,

We often work with development/integration branches that regularly
rebase, in addition to stable branches that do not. Git is used to share
two different types of branches:
  1. Pull requests and merged code with final SHA1s
  2. Work in progress with volatile SHA1s.

We’d like to have a consistent way to distinguish these two types by
advertising a branch as “volatile”.

I don't think we have branch metadata (besides reflog). The closet one
is probably config variable branch.<name>.description, which can be
picked up by format-patch to create cover letters. We could do
something similar, e.g. new config branch.<name>.volatile. The
commands can learn about it and apply special treatments if wanted.

But that would be local information only. We don't have ways to
transfer branch metadata (and we definitely don't want to just share
.git/config file with everybody). I suppose extending git protocol for
this is not hard (e.g. appending metadata in the "have" lines). The
hard part may be policy (e.g. what if the user does not want a branch
to be treated volatile by various commands even if it receives such
flag from a git server).
-- 
Duy