From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:12:16 GMT
Subject: Re: branch description
Message-ID: <7vej97x78v.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <C55CA6EB-D427-4CF5-923E-DE0071D2F870@silverinsanity.com>

Brian Gernhardt <benji@silverinsanity.com> writes:

> On Apr 15, 2008, at 1:31 PM, Russ Dill wrote:
>
>> The problem is that a branch is just a floating name for a line of
>> development. Its not really a "thing" in the repository like a tag or
>> a commit. You'd need to make some sort of special tag that describes
>> the branch or somesuch.
>
> No special tags needed.  A simple file that I'll call .git/info/
> ref_names could be a set of lines that have "<ref>\t<description>",
> like the following:
>
> refs/heads/master	Collection point for all my work
> refs/heads/ref_names	Add descriptions for branches
> refs/heads/segfault	Trying to fix bug #12345
>
> Simple, no tags, new object types or anything.  All you have to do is
> add the bits to git-branch to add, edit, and remove the description
> alongside the branch itself.
>
> Now if you want to propagate these descriptions when you push and
> pull, things get a lot more complicated.

Not complicated at all.  Put that description in-tree in a known location
(say, "help-branch") in-tree and your propagation problem is solved.

And have a scriptlet in $HOME/bin/git-help-branch to grep from that file.