On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 02:18:32AM -0400, Jeff King wrote: > On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 03:43:28PM -0700, Denton Liu wrote: > > > On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 04:28:35PM -0400, Jeff King wrote: > > 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? > > I don't think it would be `refs/notes/`, as that is assumed to contain > mappings of object ids (and if I understand correctly, this would be a > mapping of branch names to data. > > You could just have "refs/meta/descriptions/foo" pointing to a blob > which contains the description of "refs/heads/foo". That makes it easy > to edit descriptions, even if you don't like using "git branch > --edit-description". > > You could also have "refs/meta/descriptions" to point to a _single_ blob > with all of the descriptions. It could even be in the existing config > format. And then you could include it with "[include] blob = ...". That > doesn't exist yet, but it would be easy to add (it was something I had > always considered when writing the config-include code, but there was > never really a good use; and you do have to be careful about pointing to > untrusted blobs). That's a convoluted way to get where you want, but I > wonder if integrating to the existing config system would have any > benefits. I haven't really thought it through. I like the ability to include blobs for several reasons: Main one is that it handles the versioned branch description problem. But it goes further than that, there are a lot of config properties that teams might want to share amongst each other. For example, whenever a project has a custom smudge filter, usually they include some sort of config in the project's README or some sort of setup script. With some way to include a shared version of some config, this might be simpler. > > (Of course that's also only one step away from having a versioned config > file in your .git directory, but it might possibly be a bit easier to > manage, since it would always be committed). > > That's mostly off-the-top-of-my-head rambling, so please disregard > anything that seems totally off-base. :) Thanks for the discussion on this, I probably won't be implementing the blob config stuff for the purpose of branch descriptions but I think it's a good thing to think about. > > -Peff
