From: Ted Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2011 12:56:21 GMT
Subject: Re: Fwd: [Survey] Signed push
Message-ID: <20110914125621.GE16815@dhcp-172-31-195-159.cam.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <201109141428.53163.johanh@opera.com>

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 02:28:52PM +0200, Johan Herland wrote:
> On Wednesday 14. September 2011, Matthieu Moy wrote:
> > Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> writes:
> > > I wish that one could annotate a branch (e.g., at creation) and
> > > have the annotation follow the branch around.  This would be a
> > > useful place to record *why* you created the branch, your plans
> > > for it, etc.  The annotation should be modifiable, because often a
> > > branch evolves in unforeseen ways during its lifetime.  Anybody
> > > could read the annotation to get a quick idea of what kind of work
> > > is in progress.
> > 
> HOWEVER, "git notes prune" will assume that the SHA1 keys are supposed 
> to identify existing git objects, and will delete any note whose SHA1 
> key does not identify a reachable git object.
> 
> Hence, if you promise to never run "git notes prune" on 
> refs/notes/branch-descriptions, you could use that ref to store your 
> branch descriptions keyed by the SHA1 of your branch name.

It seems like notes is the wrong place to encode this.  If people
really want this, what if there was a convention where there could be
a separate branch head: ref/heads/META

which contained a directory structure like this:

<e-mail>/key			# The developer's GPG key
<e-mail>/<tree>/URL		# URL of developer's tree named <tree>
<e-mail>/<tree>/description	# Descrition of <tree>
<e-mail>/<tree>/branch/<branch-name>	# A description of that branch

etc.

Since it's a separate branch head, the contents can be pushed around
and merged very easily, and there's no danger of the information
getting lost via a garbage collection or prune operation.

If there was an association between a local branch and <e-mail>/<tree>
that it was tracking, then either a modified git core or porcelein
command could get the information from the META tree.  It would also
make it easy to fetch a developer's GPG key without having to go to
outside GPG key servers, which is a minor benefit (although maybe
that's not worth it).

	     	   	   	      	 - Ted