Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 0/4] Signed push

From: Ted Ts'o <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2011 11:51:46 -0400

On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 06:42:58PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Perhaps we shouldn't worry about tag namespace contamination to make
> things easier and simpler and stop using notes tree?

With the appropriate conventions, such as using a tag name such as
signed-<email>-<timestamp>" we can at least avoid name conflicts, at
least for all practical purposes.

There is the additional problem that "git tag -l" gets painful.  At
least for me, though, it's already mostly useless:

   % git tag -l | grep ^v[23] | wc -l
   858

I can work around this with git aliases that filter out certain
prefixes that I normally don't care about, but maybe that's something
that should be directly supported in git-tag with some git-config
parameters.

The final issue that I'd worry about with using tags is performance.
If we have hundreds of thousands or millions of tags of the form
signed-<email>-<timestamp>, is this going to be a problem?  This does
seem like something that could be worked around --- in the worst case
there could just be a locally maintained reverse index from git commit
id's to tag names.  (Although as I recall Linus objected to having
something like this for time skews, so maybe he'd object to this too.)

	       	    	     	       	     	  - Ted