Hi Dscho,

On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 11:22:16AM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Hi Peff,

On Thu, 31 Oct 2019, Jeff King wrote:

quoted

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".

The only problem with this is that it's not really versioned, as it
would be hard to go back to previous versions and/or share the history
via pushing to a remote repository.

But I guess that a very simple pseudo branch would do it, where
`refs/meta/<branch-name>` would point to a commit that has a tree
with a single file in it: `description.txt`.

So how would you envision the workflow for this? Would it be something
like,

	$ git checkout feature-1

	$ git branch --edit-description=ref # instead of =config
	# editor opens up, :wq

	# is it find to have an autogenerated commit message?
	$ git show refs/meta/feature-1
	commit 80dfea1dc4492aaabc80d23fbaffe86da55ee098 (refs/meta/feature-1)
	Author: Denton Liu [off-list ref]
	Date:   42 seconds ago

	    Update ref description

	diff --git a/description.txt b/description.txt
	new file mode 100644
	index 0000000..ed03a4b
	--- /dev/null
	+++ b/description.txt
	@@ -0,0 +1 @@
	+this is a description

I have some open questions about this, though:

* Since we're planning on sharing these descriptions with the outside
  world, how would the ref layout look like? If we're not using the
  refs/remotes namespace will it make fetching and merging notes harder?
  I know that collaborating with notes is a pain so how do we avoid
  making the same mistake?

* On the above point, what if local descriptions are at
  refs/meta/heads/feature-1 while remote descriptions are at
  refs/meta/remotes/*/feature-1?

* What would a merge workflow look like? Would we have wrapper commands
  for it or do users just have to checkout the description branch
  themselves?

Thanks,

Denton

I now like that idea a lot better than my original notes idea.

Ciao,
Dscho