On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 02:18:32AM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 03:43:28PM -0700, Denton Liu wrote:

quoted

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

I don't think it would be `refs/notes/`, as that is assumed to contain
mappings of object ids (and if I understand correctly, this would be a
mapping of branch names to data.

You could just have "refs/meta/descriptions/foo" pointing to a blob
which contains the description of "refs/heads/foo". That makes it easy
to edit descriptions, even if you don't like using "git branch
--edit-description".

You could also have "refs/meta/descriptions" to point to a _single_ blob
with all of the descriptions. It could even be in the existing config
format. And then you could include it with "[include] blob = ...". That
doesn't exist yet, but it would be easy to add (it was something I had
always considered when writing the config-include code, but there was
never really a good use; and you do have to be careful about pointing to
untrusted blobs). That's a convoluted way to get where you want, but I
wonder if integrating to the existing config system would have any
benefits. I haven't really thought it through.

I like the ability to include blobs for several reasons:

Main one is that it handles the versioned branch description problem.
But it goes further than that, there are a lot of config properties that
teams might want to share amongst each other. For example, whenever a
project has a custom smudge filter, usually they include some sort of
config in the project's README or some sort of setup script. With some
way to include a shared version of some config, this might be simpler.

(Of course that's also only one step away from having a versioned config
file in your .git directory, but it might possibly be a bit easier to
manage, since it would always be committed).

That's mostly off-the-top-of-my-head rambling, so please disregard
anything that seems totally off-base. :)

Thanks for the discussion on this, I probably won't be implementing the
blob config stuff for the purpose of branch descriptions but I think
it's a good thing to think about.

-Peff