Re: On-branch topic description support?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 21, 2022, 17:29 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqo7xiidcc.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <d58f468d-3826-1aa7-9203-5e1f473159e1@iee.email>

Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.email> writes:

Show 9 quoted lines

> If one has a plan in place for a series in preparation, I'd want to
> prepare the outline of the cover letter first, and then later let it
> float to the tip of the series after a rebase, and incorporate (meld)
> additional notelets recorded as additional empty commits.
>
> On thought is to marry this with the `rebase --autosquash` mechanism
> that will rearrange commits (when enabled) so that we could have a
> "branchtip! " subject line, similar to the `fixup! / squash!` subject
> lines to assist in that rearrangement  of the series for transmission.

Yeah, people have different preferences, and "rebase -i" is probably a key ingredient to make it work. As long as the convention to have topic description at a fixed known place on the topic branch, be it at the top or at the bottom, is followed in the end result, other tools like format-patch, am and merge can be written to follow and take advantage that known structure/topology of the topic branch.

> I'm not yet sure how the "branchtip" method would work with Pull
> Requests and the idea of actually having a push/pull exchangeable branch
> description

I think what I described for "merge" would work well for pull requests (not the traditional e-mail kind of "please pull" we see on the kernel mailing list, but the GitHub kind). Merge the topic proper, excluding the tip "empty" commit that is there only to hold the description of the topic, into the history, and use the log message from the empty commit the procedure discards as the log message for the resulting merge.