Hi Peff, On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 04:28:35PM -0400, Jeff King wrote: > On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 11:39:50AM -0700, Denton Liu wrote: > > > It seems like everyone working on git.git has their own patch management > > system. Currently, I keep all of my branch-specific configurations > > (including CC lists) and patches in a worktree within the repo so that I > > can keep my configs synced around on different computers. > > > > One thing that's missing about this setup is that I would like to > > version my branch descriptions as well since I use those to generate > > cover letters. Unfortunately, `git branch --edit-description` only > > operates on .git/config. Dscho brought up in the GGG thread[1] that perhaps we want to treat branch descriptions like notes and have them all under something like `refs/notes/branches`. This would certainly solve my problem of having versioned descriptions and it would probably do it in a much more general way than having a versioned included config. Anyone see any potential problems with this approach? > > > > As a workaround, I rewrote `git branch --edit-description` as a > > shell-script that can operate on any config file but I feel like a more > > general solution should be warranted. > > > > Would changing the option to `git branch --edit-description[=<config>]` > > make sense, where the `<config>` is optional but if it's specified, > > it'll operate on that file instead of the .git/config. > > That makes sense to me (though I don't use branch descriptions myself). > I actually wish a lot of auto-written config (like branch.*.merge) was > written to a file besides .git/config, and then just included. It would > make it easier to keep your actual config file cleaner (I usually take > the opposite route and version-control my own config in a separate file > that I include from .git/config). Yeah, I've also wanted the same... I've thought about just symlinking .git/config away but I think that causes other problems that I don't want to deal with. > > > Alternately, would it make sense to support a $GIT_CONFIG environment > > variable globally? That is, when $GIT_CONFIG is specified, git will > > read/write from $GIT_CONFIG instead of .git/config? It'd be a little > > heavy-handed for me to make the change just for this one use-case but > > perhaps people may find other uses for it? > > We used to have such a thing, and it opened a lot of weird corner cases. > Just thinking about the case you mentioned: would people be confused if > "GIT_CONFIG=foo git branch --edit-description" doesn't respect > core.editor specified in .git/config? I found the original thread that removed the functionality[2]. I'm probably not going to go with this approach since the notes approach seems more promising but going back to your question, I think that would make sense since by specifying GIT_CONFIG, a user is explicitly overriding .git/config so they should also be aware of the consequences. Thanks for your thoughts, Denton [1]: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/issues/438 [2]: https://public-inbox.org/git/alpine.LNX.1.00.0806300328380.19665@xxxxxxxxxxxx/ > > -Peff
