Re: Annotated branch ≈ annotated tag?

From: Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>
Date: Sep 28, 2011, 08:04 UTC
Message-ID: <4E82D52B.9020709@alum.mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <CAH5451nT2Z6mBPkK4B2EgJAoMpf32bcc=7UqhTDnsw4-_hJwJw@mail.gmail.com>

On 09/28/2011 09:12 AM, Andrew Ardill wrote:

Show 19 quoted lines

> On 28 September 2011 14:23, Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> [snip]
>>
>> [1] If the retention of annotation history were considered a
>> requirement, the annotation object could record as a "parent" the object
>> name of the annotation object that it is succeeding.  But I don't think
>> that this is a good idea; it would make branches too heavyweight and
>> every branch update would be recorded permanently, both of which are
>> contrary to the git philosophy.
> 
> If this was required, a better way would be to update the parent object only
> if the description changed. You would then have a nice little DAG that
> records changes to the description and could be used in 3-way merges etc.
> You would of course get lots of 'dead' annotation objects pointing to the
> previous change, however that shouldn't be too much of an issue.
> 
> At this point, however, I ask how is an annotation object any different to
> placing an annotation file in our repository. Perhaps there is no difference,
> except that one is a convention and the other is provided.

Yes, if history is being preserved, then the annotation objects would not be much different than storing a file in the repository. But even then, there are differences:

- A branch annotation would be separate from the source code and not
appear in the working tree, which seems more appropriate for metadata.

- git and other tools would know where to find the annotation instead of
having to configure whether a particular project uses annotations and if
so where to find them.  This would make it easier to use the annotations
in git workflow like the generation of pull requests.

- The merge rules for annotations would be different than those for
other files.

But I believe that branch annotation history should *not* be retained, so storing the annotations in the source tree is not even an option (except perhaps in another artificial branch used only for annotations).

Michael

-- 
Michael Haggerty
mhagger@alum.mit.edu
http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/