Re: [RFC PATCH 1/2] notes: support fetching notes from an external repo

> Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@oracle.com> writes:
> 
>> Notes are currently always fetched from the current repo. However, in
>> certain situations you may want to keep notes in a separate repository
>> altogether.
>>
>> In my specific case, I am using cgit to display notes for repositories
>> that are owned by others but hosted on a shared machine, so I cannot
>> really add the notes directly to their repositories.
> 
> My gut reaction is that I am not interested at all in the above
> approach, even though the problem you are trying to solve is
> interesting.  Mostly because notes are not the only decorations your
> users may want.  What if you want to "log --decorate" their
> repository contents with your own tags that annotate their commits?
> A notes-only approach to mix repositories is way too narrow.
> 
> A usable alternative _might_ be to introduce a way to "borrow" refs
> and objects from a different repository as if you cloned from and
> continuously fetching from them.  We already have a mechanism to
> borrow objects from another repository in the form of "alternate
> object database" that lets us pretend objects in their repository
> are locally available.  We can invent a similar mechanism that lets
> any of their ref as if it were our local ref, e.g. their "main"
> branch at their refs/heads/main might appear to exist at our
> refs/borrowed/X/heads/main.