Re: [PATCH 00/15] git-note: A mechanisim for providing free-form after-the-fact annotations on commits

[Johan Herland <johan@herland.net>]

On Monday 28 May 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > I can't see why the current implementation would scale any worse than an
> > equivalent number of (annotated/signed) tags. But then again, the tag
> > system might not have been designed with tens of thousands of tag objects
> > in mind. :)
> 
> Right. I was more thinking that this "notes" thing could potentially be a 
> very useful thing for some random workflow - using notes to indicate that 
> some commit has been vetted by somebody, for example (ie adding things 
> like "Acked-by:" after-the-fact, which happens for the kernel).
> 
> And once you start using notes for something like that, I think you're 
> going to end up with a set of notes that grows with history, and 
> potentially grows quite quickly.
> 
> So I can see people having thousands of tags, but usually you only tag 
> releases. In contrast, I can see notes being used not as a "per release" 
> thing, but closer to a "per commit" thing. And that kind of worries me, I 
> can see workflows where you end up having tons and tons of notes.
> 
> But hey, maybe I just worry unnecessarily.

I still don't see what makes note objects inherently more expensive than
commit objects. Except for the refs, of course, but we're getting rid
of those (at least replacing them with a more efficient reverse mapping).

And even if we _do_ end up with 10 notes per commit, we could always
design some kind of "supernote" that lets "git-gc" pack all the notes
related to a commit into _one_ object.


Have fun!

...Johan

-- 
Johan Herland, <johan@herland.net>
www.herland.net