More support on branch description?

Hi,

The coming v1.7.9 will introduce branch description, mainly used in integration process. I think we could make it useful for users who don't extensively use request-pull/format-patch. Showing a short summary along with branch name in "git branch" would be nice. "branch -v" is already used for something else, maybe we can come up with another option, or "-v -v"? Another place we could show branch description is "git status". What do you think?

On 01/19/2012 03:14 PM, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy wrote:

Junio suggested a new option "--verbose-format" for branch some weeks ago:

	http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/186727

I planned on working on it, but haven't found the time yet nor do I really know which way to go.? (pretty.c seems to be the right place for format code, but it's very commit format specific atm.)

On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 10:14 PM, Michael Schubert <mschub@elegosoft.com> wrote:

Thanks. I must have missed that. There's another piece of formatting code in "for-each-ref --format" command (I happened to have a look at it a few days ago). It's ref-specific, probably closer than pretty.c for this kind of stuff.

Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com> writes:

I agree that it would be nice to give users access to the information even if the branch ends up being merged to the master branch by you and never leaves your repository by itself.

You however are misguided to say "Showing a short summary along...".

The branch description support is to give users a place to record detailed explanation about a branch, similar in size to what you would normally place in a log message of a commit or a cover letter of a series. There wasn't any convenient place to do so for a branch that is (1) inherently a moving target while it is being developed and (2) is not a good match for tags and notes.

There already is a good place for a brief summary and it is called "branch name". Name your branches just like you name your functions.

On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 5:22 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

It should have been "short status".

I was thinking about that (and wondering if I abused branch.*.description), maybe we can have a similar convention for commit message, one short line, empty line, then more detail explanation. But branch.*.description is tied to format-patch/request-pull, maybe another config key.

Yes, but it's not suitable for current status of the branch.