Re: branch description

From: Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 22, 2008, 18:59 UTC
Message-ID: <m33apdra0w.fsf@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.10.0804221945060.3452@pollux.milkiway.cos>

Michael Dressel <MichaelTiloDressel@t-online.de> writes:

> On Friday 18 April 2008, Jakub Narebski wrote:

Show 17 quoted lines

> > Let me sum up here proposals where to put branch description:
> >
> > [...]
> 
> what's the opinion of having a new branch object? Actually the tag
> object probably already does the job? This would spoil the elegant
> light weight current branch references. But tags are not that heavy.
> 
> In this approach the tags would not reference commits but tags. And
> tags have annotation. The difference to the normal tags would be that
> these tags are referenced from refs/heads/<branch> instead of
> refs/tags.
> 
> I have no clue how involved this change would become and if the
> benefit would justify the effort. I guess using proper objects for
> branches would only be justified if additional advantages could be
> achieved.

This won't work.  With described (annotated) branches, there are two
pieces of data associated with a branch:
 * commit it points to (branch head)
 * description of a branch

Branch head changes frequently (commit, reset, bisect, rebase), while description should change rarely. Those two pieces of data are independent. Tag object would unnecessary join/fuse those two together.

Also, for exach commit on a branch, or for each moving of branch ref (reset, amend, bisect), you would have to create tag object, which would accumulate only to be garbage collected some time in the future...

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git