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

[Denton Liu <liu.denton@gmail.com>]

Hi Dscho,

On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 11:22:16AM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> Hi Peff,
> 
> On Thu, 31 Oct 2019, 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".
> 
> The only problem with this is that it's not really versioned, as it
> would be hard to go back to previous versions and/or share the history
> via pushing to a remote repository.
> 
> But I guess that a very simple pseudo branch would do it, where
> `refs/meta/<branch-name>` would point to a commit that has a tree
> with a single file in it: `description.txt`.

So how would you envision the workflow for this? Would it be something
like,

	$ git checkout feature-1

	$ git branch --edit-description=ref # instead of =config
	# editor opens up, :wq

	# is it find to have an autogenerated commit message?
	$ git show refs/meta/feature-1
	commit 80dfea1dc4492aaabc80d23fbaffe86da55ee098 (refs/meta/feature-1)
	Author: Denton Liu <liu.denton@gmail.com>
	Date:   42 seconds ago

	    Update ref description

	diff --git a/description.txt b/description.txt
	new file mode 100644
	index 0000000..ed03a4b
	--- /dev/null
	+++ b/description.txt
	@@ -0,0 +1 @@
	+this is a description

I have some open questions about this, though:

* Since we're planning on sharing these descriptions with the outside
  world, how would the ref layout look like? If we're not using the
  refs/remotes namespace will it make fetching and merging notes harder?
  I know that collaborating with notes is a pain so how do we avoid
  making the same mistake?

* On the above point, what if local descriptions are at
  refs/meta/heads/feature-1 while remote descriptions are at
  refs/meta/remotes/*/feature-1?

* What would a merge workflow look like? Would we have wrapper commands
  for it or do users just have to checkout the description branch
  themselves?

Thanks,

Denton

> 
> I now like that idea a lot better than my original notes idea.
> 
> Ciao,
> Dscho