Re: Does anyone use git-notes?

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Scott Chacon <schacon@gmail.com> writes:

> I would like to write a post on how to use them, but I'm a bit
> confused as to how people actually use them on a day to day basis.  I
> appears to me in trying to work out a flow for them that the lack of
> an ability to merge them makes them very difficult to use for anything
> practical.  Can someone share with me how they use them and what the
> cycle is?

I have a custom post-applypatch hook (see my "todo" branch) enabled and
then use the amlook script (again, see my "todo" branch) to inspect the
notes the hook left.

After applying a received patch e-mail, the result is annotated with
enough information to identify which message it came from by the hook (I
probably should add more information to the notes, but never got around to
it).  When I am scouring the mailing list backlog to see if I have missed
something interesting (sometimes I find interest in a topic that I thought
totally uninteresting earlier), the amlook script is used to see if the
patch has already been applied, and if so to which branch.

Looking through millions of notes this way won't scale (iow, amlook is a
bad example of using this feature, as the notes tree is used as a database
index in the wrong direction), by the way, so you may probably not want to
use it as a good example.