Re: branch annotations?

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 08:46:44AM -0600, Tim Chase wrote:

> Is there any way to associate some sort of note with a branch that
> would be shown when listing them?  While I currently have things like
> "issue/QA-42", it would be nice to have a note associated with it so
> I could do something like
> 
>   $ git branch --show-notes
>     issue/CR-88: make sure NoSQL engines support .CSV file backends
>     issue/QA-31: add missile launch codes
>   * issue/QA-42: support flying cars
>     master

There is a "branch description" config entry that you can edit with "git
branch --edit-description" (or by simply tweaking the config file
yourself). However, it is currently only used by git-request-pull when
generating the request.

I think it makes sense to be able to show it as part of "git branch",
but the verbose branch listing there is a bit of a mess. Doing it
cleanly would probably involve refactoring the branch-display code to
allow users to specify more flexible formats.

Ramkumar (cc'd) was looking into that refactoring a while back, but I
did not follow it closely (it looks like some of the underlying
for-each-ref refactoring is on the 'next' branch?).

-Peff