[PATCH 0/6] A handful of "branch description" patches

Here are a few patches that I have queued in 'pu', redoing some of the patches I already sent out to the list, around "branch description".

The original motivation was to make the push/pull workflow appear more robust by allowing human-to-human communication to leave audit trail that can be verified when it becomes necessary. Namely:

 * request-pull message carries the SHA-1 of what is expected to be
   merged; and

 * "signed push" leaves the SHA-1 of what was pushed to the remote,
   cryptographically signed.

Linus's reaction, as I understood him, was "if we are spending efforts to add more information, the end result should be more informative to humans not just to machines", and I agree. An example of piece of information we often talk about is branch description---what a particular branch is meant to achieve. Both request-pull messages and declarations of what was pushed are good places to record that piece of information.

So here is a partially re-rolled series to get us closer.

 * The logic to read from an existing branch description was in
   builtin/branch.c in the original series, but the first patch separates
   it out into branch.c as a helper function;

 * The second one is a digression; the branch description describes what
   the topic aims to achieve, so it was natural to use it to prime the
   cover letter while preparing a patch series with format-patch;

 * The third one that adds "branch --edit-description" is basically
   unchanged modulo small leakfix from the original round;

 * And the remainder of the series for request-pull is the same as the
   last round.

The second patch uses facility introduced in bk/ancestry-path topic, so it would be the easiest to apply the series on top of a merge of c05b988 to 'master'.

I haven't updated the "signed push" patch to use this information yet.

Junio C Hamano (6):
  branch: add read_branch_desc() helper function
  format-patch: use branch description in cover letter
  branch: teach --edit-description option
  request-pull: modernize style
  request-pull: state what commit to expect
  request-pull: use the branch description

 Documentation/git-branch.txt |    5 +++
 branch.c                     |   31 ++++++++++++++++++
 branch.h                     |    5 +++
 builtin/branch.c             |   56 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
 builtin/log.c                |   71 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--
 git-request-pull.sh          |   73 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------------
 t/t5150-request-pull.sh      |    6 +++
 7 files changed, 215 insertions(+), 32 deletions(-)