Re: [RFC PATCH 1/2] notes: support fetching notes from an external repo

[Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@oracle.com>]

On 8/2/22 17:40, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@oracle.com> writes:
> 
>> Notes are currently always fetched from the current repo. However, in
>> certain situations you may want to keep notes in a separate repository
>> altogether.
>>
>> In my specific case, I am using cgit to display notes for repositories
>> that are owned by others but hosted on a shared machine, so I cannot
>> really add the notes directly to their repositories.
> 
> My gut reaction is that I am not interested at all in the above
> approach, even though the problem you are trying to solve is
> interesting.  Mostly because notes are not the only decorations your
> users may want.  What if you want to "log --decorate" their
> repository contents with your own tags that annotate their commits?
> A notes-only approach to mix repositories is way too narrow.
> 
> A usable alternative _might_ be to introduce a way to "borrow" refs
> and objects from a different repository as if you cloned from and
> continuously fetching from them.  We already have a mechanism to
> borrow objects from another repository in the form of "alternate
> object database" that lets us pretend objects in their repository
> are locally available.  We can invent a similar mechanism that lets
> any of their ref as if it were our local ref, e.g. their "main"
> branch at their refs/heads/main might appear to exist at our
> refs/borrowed/X/heads/main.  

Hi Junio,

Thanks for the reply.

To be clear, are you saying there is no way you would ever take my
patches in their current form, even though they only rearrange internal
workings (and have no other user-observable effects) to solve a problem
I am currently facing?

The thing is, I personally have no use for displaying refs borrowed from
another repository at this time, and I'm not sure I have either the time
or the ability to provide what you are asking for.

I don't think my patches preclude adding "borrowed refs" as a feature at
a later time, so can we not do that when somebody actually has a use for it?

Just to provide a bit more background: These two patches are just the
first two in a bigger project to make extensive use of git notes to
provide added value to the whole Linux kernel community -- in other
words, this is not just for myself, I am trying here to upstream our
internal patches for the benefit of everybody. I have cgit patches as
well (but I'm waiting to submit them until git can support them) and
hundreds of thousands of notes annotating Linux kernel commits with
useful information.

Respectfully,


Vegard