Re: git branch --edit-description a custom file

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

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.

(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. :)

-Peff