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Re: Storing additional information in commit headers

From
Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>
Date
Aug 2, 2011, 13:53 UTC
Message-ID
<4E380148.7010701@alum.mit.edu>
In-Reply-To
<20110801182015.GA3100@fishbowl.rw.madduck.net>
On 08/01/2011 08:20 PM, martin f krafft wrote:
> Are there any strong reasons against my use of commit headers for
> specific, well-defined purposes in contained use-cases? E.g. are
> there tools known to only copy "known" headers, which could
> potentially break my assumptions?

Before you store important information in a git-internal data structure, please consider:

* Some of your developers might prefer using another DVCS (e.g.,
Mercurial via hg-git) and they will not be able to see the information
at all
* Some day the main project might want to (god forbid!) switch to a
successor to git, and your extra information might be difficult to migrate.
* Somebody might want to work with your project from a tarball rather
than having to install and use git.

Therefore, I recommend a strong bias towards storing information in as transparent, non-system-specific a way as possible. Metadata and scripts stored within the file tree part of the repository are typically a lot easier to work with and more transparent than git-specific hacks.

That being said, I haven't understood your application well enough to know whether these biases might be trumped by convenience in your particular situation.

Michael
-- 
Michael Haggerty
mhagger@alum.mit.edu
http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/
Previous: Jeff King
Message 23 of 23 in “Storing additional information in commit headers”
  1. martin f krafftAug 1, 2011
  2. Sverre RabbelierAug 1, 2011
  3. martin f krafftAug 1, 2011
  4. Clemens BuchacherAug 1, 2011
  5. martin f krafftAug 1, 2011
  6. martin f krafftAug 1, 2011
  7. Martin LanghoffAug 1, 2011
  8. martin f krafftAug 1, 2011
  9. Jeff KingAug 1, 2011
  10. martin f krafftAug 1, 2011
  11. Jeff KingAug 2, 2011
  12. martin f krafftAug 2, 2011
  13. working prototype of orphan parent commits as datastores (was: Storing additional information in commit headers)martin f krafft, Aug 2, 2011
  14. Jeff KingAug 2, 2011
  15. martin f krafftAug 2, 2011
  16. martin f krafftAug 2, 2011
  17. Jeff KingAug 2, 2011
  18. martin f krafftAug 2, 2011
  19. per-ref data storage (was: Storing additional information in commit headers)martin f krafft, Aug 2, 2011
  20. martin f krafftAug 2, 2011
  21. Jeff KingAug 4, 2011
  22. Jeff KingAug 4, 2011
  23. Michael HaggertyAug 2, 2011

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