Re: git branch descriptions

[Michael J Gruber <git@drmicha.warpmail.net>]

Jonathan Nieder venit, vidit, dixit 11.05.2010 01:26:
> Hi,
> 
> Joel Reed wrote:
> 
>> Working on a wide range of topics/branches from week to week and
>> project to project, it's sometimes difficult to quickly remember
>> what each branch is about, without doing a git diff master <branch>.
>>  I like to keep branch names short so they're easy to switch to and
>> from, but being able to attach a description that would display when
>> doing a "git branch" would be a huge help.
> 
> I think the closest thing we have now is ‘git branch -v’, which tells
> the subject of the commit at the tip of the branch.  ‘git notes’
> annotates commits rather than branches, so it occupies a different
> niche.
> 
> Your request is a reasonable one, and it has come up a few times in
> different forms over the years:
> 
>  . per-branch descriptions in .git/description[1]
>  . per-branch descriptions in .git/config[2][3]
>  . README branch whose files describe the branches[4]
> 
> Number [2] is my preferred choice (and comes with code!), for what
> it’s worth.
> 
> That doesn’t address the problem of how to _share_ branch
> descriptions.  That could be dealt with by extending the wire protocol
> as in [1], I think.  Just sharing a list of branch descriptions is a
> bad idea imho, since related repositories need to be able to name
> their branches independently to avoid painful coordination problems.

I have a mostly working idea (working when done "manually") on how to
use notes for that. As we, know, we can share notes without overriding
our own notes (and improving the merge/combine facilities would benefit
all note users). I'll try to come up with a proof-of-concept patch, but
probably not before next week.

Michael