Re: git branch --edit-description a custom file

From: Denton Liu <liu.denton@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 31, 2019, 17:35 UTC
Message-ID: <20191031173507.GA70819@generichostname>
In-Reply-To: <20191031061832.GA20830@sigill.intra.peff.net>

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

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

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> 
> (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