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Re: git branch descriptions

From
Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date
May 10, 2010, 23:26 UTC
Message-ID
<20100510232612.GA6890@progeny.tock>
In-Reply-To
<657A681BEF27534399890012B8C8E50E1AD63D1FEA@lcs-exchange01.Lantekcs.com>
Hi,
Joel Reed wrote:
Show 6 quoted lines
> Working on a wide range of topics/branches from week to week and
> project to project, it's sometimes difficult to quickly remember
> what each branch is about, without doing a git diff master <branch>.
>  I like to keep branch names short so they're easy to switch to and
> from, but being able to attach a description that would display when
> doing a "git branch" would be a huge help.

I think the closest thing we have now is ‘git branch -v’, which tells the subject of the commit at the tip of the branch. ‘git notes’ annotates commits rather than branches, so it occupies a different niche.

Your request is a reasonable one, and it has come up a few times in different forms over the years:

 . per-branch descriptions in .git/description[1]
 . per-branch descriptions in .git/config[2][3]
 . README branch whose files describe the branches[4]

Number [2] is my preferred choice (and comes with code!), for what it’s worth.

That doesn’t address the problem of how to _share_ branch descriptions. That could be dealt with by extending the wire protocol as in [1], I think. Just sharing a list of branch descriptions is a bad idea imho, since related repositories need to be able to name their branches independently to avoid painful coordination problems.

> My only intention with this email is to say "thanks" and put in a
> vote for git branch descriptions.

The best vote is to write a sample script for yourself, try it out, and tell us how it goes. :)

Thanks for bringing this up. Jonathan

[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/8130/focus=8187 [2] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/33528/focus=33563 [3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/46855/focus=47077 [4] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/93333/focus=93491

Previous: Ramkumar RamachandraNext: Geert Bosch
Message 3 of 10 in “git branch descriptions”
  1. Joel ReedMay 10, 2010
  2. Ramkumar RamachandraMay 10, 2010
  3. Jonathan NiederMay 10, 2010
  4. Geert BoschMay 11, 2010
  5. Joel ReedMay 11, 2010
  6. Michael J GruberMay 11, 2010
  7. Joel ReedMay 11, 2010
  8. Joel ReedMay 11, 2010
  9. Ævar Arnfjörð BjarmasonMay 11, 2010
  10. Joel ReedMay 11, 2010

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