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

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

Hi Peff,

On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 04:28:35PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 11:39:50AM -0700, Denton Liu wrote:
> 
> > It seems like everyone working on git.git has their own patch management
> > system. Currently, I keep all of my branch-specific configurations
> > (including CC lists) and patches in a worktree within the repo so that I
> > can keep my configs synced around on different computers.
> > 
> > One thing that's missing about this setup is that I would like to
> > version my branch descriptions as well since I use those to generate
> > cover letters. Unfortunately, `git branch --edit-description` only
> > operates on .git/config.

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?

> > 
> > As a workaround, I rewrote `git branch --edit-description` as a
> > shell-script that can operate on any config file but I feel like a more
> > general solution should be warranted.
> > 
> > Would changing the option to `git branch --edit-description[=<config>]`
> > make sense, where the `<config>` is optional but if it's specified,
> > it'll operate on that file instead of the .git/config.
> 
> That makes sense to me (though I don't use branch descriptions myself).
> I actually wish a lot of auto-written config (like branch.*.merge) was
> written to a file besides .git/config, and then just included. It would
> make it easier to keep your actual config file cleaner (I usually take
> the opposite route and version-control my own config in a separate file
> that I include from .git/config).

Yeah, I've also wanted the same... I've thought about just symlinking
.git/config away but I think that causes other problems that I don't
want to deal with.

> 
> > Alternately, would it make sense to support a $GIT_CONFIG environment
> > variable globally? That is, when $GIT_CONFIG is specified, git will
> > read/write from $GIT_CONFIG instead of .git/config? It'd be a little
> > heavy-handed for me to make the change just for this one use-case but
> > perhaps people may find other uses for it?
> 
> We used to have such a thing, and it opened a lot of weird corner cases.
> Just thinking about the case you mentioned: would people be confused if
> "GIT_CONFIG=foo git branch --edit-description" doesn't respect
> core.editor specified in .git/config?

I found the original thread that removed the functionality[2]. I'm
probably not going to go with this approach since the notes approach
seems more promising but going back to your question, I think that would
make sense since by specifying GIT_CONFIG, a user is explicitly
overriding .git/config so they should also be aware of the consequences.

Thanks for your thoughts,

Denton

[1]: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/issues/438
[2]: https://public-inbox.org/git/alpine.LNX.1.00.0806300328380.19665@iabervon.org/

> 
> -Peff