Apologies for re-sending; unclear whether my email was delivered since I sent it before my subscription was confirmed. On 20 Sep 2014, at 20:47, James H. Fisher <jhf@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > In the documentation for git notes [1] I read: > > In principle, a note is a regular Git blob, and any kind of (non-)format is accepted. > > Then, since the empty string is a valid regular Git blob, the empty string is also a valid git note. > > Therefore this behavior was unexpected for me: > >> git notes --ref=foo add -m '' > Removing note for object 97b8860c071898d9e162678ea1035a8ced2f8b1f > > I was surprised to see that this behavior was deliberately introduced: > >> git log -1 a0b4dfa > commit a0b4dfa9b35a2ebac578ea5547b041bb78557238 > Author: Johan Herland <johan@xxxxxxxxxxx> > Date: Sat Feb 13 22:28:24 2010 +0100 > > Teach builtin-notes to remove empty notes > > When the result of editing a note is an empty string, the associated note > entry should be deleted from the notes tree. > > This allows deleting notes by invoking either "git notes -m ''" or > "git notes -F /dev/null". > > Signed-off-by: Johan Herland <johan@xxxxxxxxxxx> > Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> > > I don’t understand what the motivation for this change was. Yes, it "allows deleting notes" by providing the empty string, but there is a specific subcommand for removal of a note, `git notes remove`, which makes this intention much clearer. > > I have specific motivation for wanting to store the empty string as a git note, as distinct from the non-existence of a note for the object. (Specifically I have a tool to annotate a commit with a list of files that satisfy a certain condition. The empty string represents the empty list, a valid value which asserts that no files satisfied the condition. I can imagine many other use cases for which the empty string is a useful git note.) > > Does anyone know why we have the existing behavior? Is it for "technical reasons” or was it actually considered desirable? > > James Fisher > > [1]: https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-notes.html -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html