Re: Feature request: flagging “volatile” branches for integration/development

From: Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 4, 2017, 14:01 UTC
Message-ID: <CACsJy8A5AXs5jQUQAdb=tuBzWYKNbu5DPnQ88DXott8ht61egA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <70ccb8fc-30f2-5b23-a832-9e470787a945@intel.com>

On Wed, Feb 1, 2017 at 12:12 AM, Herbert, Marc <marc.herbert@intel.com> wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> (Thanks to Josh Triplett[*] for contributing to this message)
>
> Hi,
>
> We often work with development/integration branches that regularly
> rebase, in addition to stable branches that do not. Git is used to share
> two different types of branches:
>   1. Pull requests and merged code with final SHA1s
>   2. Work in progress with volatile SHA1s.
>
> We’d like to have a consistent way to distinguish these two types by
> advertising a branch as “volatile”.

I don't think we have branch metadata (besides reflog). The closet one is probably config variable branch.<name>.description, which can be picked up by format-patch to create cover letters. We could do something similar, e.g. new config branch.<name>.volatile. The commands can learn about it and apply special treatments if wanted.

But that would be local information only. We don't have ways to transfer branch metadata (and we definitely don't want to just share .git/config file with everybody). I suppose extending git protocol for this is not hard (e.g. appending metadata in the "have" lines). The hard part may be policy (e.g. what if the user does not want a branch to be treated volatile by various commands even if it receives such flag from a git server).

-- 
Duy