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

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi Peff,

On Thu, 31 Oct 2019, Jeff King wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 03:43:28PM -0700, Denton Liu wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 04:28:35PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:
> > 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?
>
> I don't think it would be `refs/notes/`, as that is assumed to contain
> mappings of object ids (and if I understand correctly, this would be a
> mapping of branch names to data.
>
> You could just have "refs/meta/descriptions/foo" pointing to a blob
> which contains the description of "refs/heads/foo". That makes it easy
> to edit descriptions, even if you don't like using "git branch
> --edit-description".

The only problem with this is that it's not really versioned, as it
would be hard to go back to previous versions and/or share the history
via pushing to a remote repository.

But I guess that a very simple pseudo branch would do it, where
`refs/meta/<branch-name>` would point to a commit that has a tree
with a single file in it: `description.txt`.

I now like that idea a lot better than my original notes idea.

Ciao,
Dscho

>
> You could also have "refs/meta/descriptions" to point to a _single_ blob
> with all of the descriptions. It could even be in the existing config
> format. And then you could include it with "[include] blob = ...". That
> doesn't exist yet, but it would be easy to add (it was something I had
> always considered when writing the config-include code, but there was
> never really a good use; and you do have to be careful about pointing to
> untrusted blobs). That's a convoluted way to get where you want, but I
> wonder if integrating to the existing config system would have any
> benefits. I haven't really thought it through.
>
> (Of course that's also only one step away from having a versioned config
> file in your .git directory, but it might possibly be a bit easier to
> manage, since it would always be committed).
>
> That's mostly off-the-top-of-my-head rambling, so please disregard
> anything that seems totally off-base. :)
>
> -Peff
>