Re: Storing state in $GIT_DIR

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Aug 26, 2005, 05:31 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0508252219520.3317@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0508260101390.23242@iabervon.org>

On Fri, 26 Aug 2005, Daniel Barkalow wrote:

> 
> I don't think this buys you anything, because then the tag needs to be
> accessible from something, which is the same problem you were trying to
> solve for the commit.

Yes.

We had an earlier discussion somewhat along these lines, where a "collection" object might be useful. The "tree" object is that, of course, but the tree object really is very strictly structured (and has to be that way). There might be a valid case for an object that can point to an arbitrary collection of other objects, and have a free-form tail to it.

Of course, such an object would inevitably look very much like a generalized "tag" object, so one possibility might be to just allow a tag to have multiple object pointers.

We could easily generalize the tag format: just make it be something like

 - 1 or more lines of "object <sha1>"
 - make the "type " line optional (it used to have an implementation 
   reason: the internal interfaces always used to want to know the type 
   up-front, but we've moved away from that).
 - a single "tag" line to start the free-form section, and to name the 
   collection some way.

That kind of extension shouldn't be too hard, and might make tags much more generally usable (ie you could say "I sign these <n> official releases" or something).

			Linus