Re: [PATCH] format-patch: use raw format for notes

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 02:27:38PM +1000, Sam Bobroff wrote:

> >  - It is very much intended to allow The "(foo)" after the "Notes"
> >    label to show which notes ref the note comes from, because there
> >    can be more than one notes refs that annotate the same commit.
> 
> Right, that makes perfect sense to me when it's being output locally.
> 
> But the ref names are local to my git repo and there is no reaason why
> they should be meaningful or even known to the recipients of the patch
> email.

I can see how your notes names might not be of interest to others. But I
can also see how they _could_ be. For instance, if you kept test result
annotations in a notes ref, you would want to mark them as such.

The idea of the current output is that you'd put general text into
"refs/notes/commits" (which shows up only as "Notes:"). And if you are
putting notes in another ref, you have some reason to do so, which
implies that it's worth showing that they're not in the default ref.

I grant that there are reasons to do so which might not be worth showing
(e.g., you might be pushing and fetching refs, and keep some hierarchy).
But I don't think "are we emailing them" is a robust determiner of "are
they worth showing". So this probably needs to be a separate option,
rather than tied to the output format.

Or possibly there should be a naming convention (e.g., that everything
that ends in "/commits" doesn't have its name shown, which would allow
multiple hierarchies). It's hard to say without knowing the reason you
chose a non-default refname in the first place.

-Peff