Hi Peff,

On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 04:28:35PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 11:39:50AM -0700, Denton Liu wrote:

quoted

It seems like everyone working on git.git has their own patch management
system. Currently, I keep all of my branch-specific configurations
(including CC lists) and patches in a worktree within the repo so that I
can keep my configs synced around on different computers.

One thing that's missing about this setup is that I would like to
version my branch descriptions as well since I use those to generate
cover letters. Unfortunately, `git branch --edit-description` only
operates on .git/config.

Dscho brought up in the GGG thread[1] that perhaps we want to treat
branch descriptions like notes and have them all under something like
`refs/notes/branches`. This would certainly solve my problem of
having versioned descriptions and it would probably do it in a much more
general way than having a versioned included config.

Anyone see any potential problems with this approach?

quoted

As a workaround, I rewrote `git branch --edit-description` as a
shell-script that can operate on any config file but I feel like a more
general solution should be warranted.

Would changing the option to `git branch --edit-description[=<config>]`
make sense, where the `<config>` is optional but if it's specified,
it'll operate on that file instead of the .git/config.

That makes sense to me (though I don't use branch descriptions myself).
I actually wish a lot of auto-written config (like branch.*.merge) was
written to a file besides .git/config, and then just included. It would
make it easier to keep your actual config file cleaner (I usually take
the opposite route and version-control my own config in a separate file
that I include from .git/config).

Yeah, I've also wanted the same... I've thought about just symlinking
.git/config away but I think that causes other problems that I don't
want to deal with.

quoted

Alternately, would it make sense to support a $GIT_CONFIG environment
variable globally? That is, when $GIT_CONFIG is specified, git will
read/write from $GIT_CONFIG instead of .git/config? It'd be a little
heavy-handed for me to make the change just for this one use-case but
perhaps people may find other uses for it?

We used to have such a thing, and it opened a lot of weird corner cases.
Just thinking about the case you mentioned: would people be confused if
"GIT_CONFIG=foo git branch --edit-description" doesn't respect
core.editor specified in .git/config?

I found the original thread that removed the functionality[2]. I'm
probably not going to go with this approach since the notes approach
seems more promising but going back to your question, I think that would
make sense since by specifying GIT_CONFIG, a user is explicitly
overriding .git/config so they should also be aware of the consequences.

Thanks for your thoughts,

Denton

[1]: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/issues/438
[2]: https://public-inbox.org/git/alpine.LNX.1.00.0806300328380.19665@iabervon.org/

-Peff