Distinguishing FF vs non-FF updates in the reflog?

[Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanwen@google.com>]

Hi there,

I'm working on some extensions to Gerrit for which it would be very
beneficial if we could tell from the reflog if an update is a
fast-forward or not: if we find a SHA1 in the reflog, and see there
were only FF updates since, we can be sure that the SHA1 is reachable
from the branch, without having to open packfiles and decode commits.

For the reftable format, I think we could store this easily by
introducing more record types. Today we have 0 = deletion, 1 = update,
and we could add 2 = FF update, 3 = non-FF update.

However, the textual reflog format doesn't easily allow for this.
However, we might add a convention, eg. have the message start with
'FF' or 'NFF' depending on the nature of the update.

Does this make sense, and if yes is it worth proposing a change?

thanks,
-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - Google Munich
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