Re: Commit annotations (was:: Octopus merge: unique (?) to git, but is it useful?)

[Johan Herland <johan@herland.net>]

On Tuesday 03 June 2008, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Jun 2008, Jakub Narebski wrote:
> > By the way, what is status of git-notes / commit annotations?  Did it
> > got abandoned, on hiatus, or what?
> 
> You probably meant to Cc: me, and Linus, right?
> 
> I all but abandoned it.  It works, but I do not need it, and kind of 
> waited for the guy who wanted them to chime in, so that I did not waste my 
> time in vain.
> 
> IIRC it was Johan Herland, but I could be wrong.

Yes, I made the first (severely misguided) implementations [1][2] which
prompted Dscho to create an alternative implementation [3]. Although Dscho's
design was certainly more Git-esque than mine (keeping the notes in a
(pseudo)branch instead of creating a totally separate infrastructure for
note storage), at some point his efforts stalled (due to a combination of
scalability problems and/or lack of interest, IIRC).

I was happy to see some of this work recently resumed by Geoffrey Irving
[4].

(Side note: It is funny how Geoffrey's patch-id cache can be seen as yet
another instance of the reverse-mapping softref mechanism I proposed as
part of the first git-notes implementation [5])

>From the initial interest in git-notes, and the sporadic requests that have
been posted since its first mention, it seems that git-notes would be a
useful feature for many Git users. However, neither me nor Dscho have the
time/interest to keep pushing it. Maybe it's time for someone else to pick
up the torch?


Have fun! :)

...Johan


[1]: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/46770/focus=48540
[2]: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/49052
[3]: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/52598
[4]: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/83484
[5]: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/49052/focus=49592

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