Re: Comment on weak refs

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Jun 10, 2007, 06:33 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0706100716480.4059@racer.site>
In-Reply-To: <200706100325.32846.johan@herland.net>

Hi,

On Sun, 10 Jun 2007, Johan Herland wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> On Sunday 10 June 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
> > Maybe you first think A and B are related and then later change your 
> > mind.  Should "softref" relationships be versioned?
> 
> Intriguing idea. Not immediately sure how we would implement it 
> though...

Has my lightweight annotation patch reached you?

I like my approach better than yours, because it is

1) a way, way smaller patch, and
2) it automatically includes the versionability.

After thinking about it a little more (my plane was slow, and as a result I am allowed to spend 8 more hours in Paris), I think that a small but crucial change would make this thing even more useful:

Instead of having "core.showAnnotations" be a boolean config, it might be better to have "core.annotationsRef" instead, overrideable by the environment variable GIT_ANNOTATION_REF.

With this, you can have different refs for different kinds of annotations.

For example, some people might add bugtracker comments (even comments like "this commit was bad: introduced bug #798, solved by commit 9899fdadc.."). Those comments could live in refs/annotations/bugs. To see them, just say

	GIT_ANNOTATION_REF=refs/annotations/bugs gitk

Voila.

I am quite certain that treating annotations as branches, containing fan-out directories for the reverse lookup. I am even quite certain that in most cases, a working-directory-less merging is possible for such annotations.

Ciao, Dscho