Subject: Re: Fwd: [Survey] Signed push

From: Johan Herland <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2011 18:14:04 +0200

On Wednesday 14. September 2011, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 4:03 AM, Matthieu Moy
> 
> <[email-masked]> wrote:
> > Would the notes mechanism be able to annotate ref names instead of
> > commit sha1?
> 
> That would be a horrible, horrible notion.
> 
> It's quite common to have multiple branches with the same SHA1. It
> might be in the "experimental-development" branch, but it got through
> testing with flying colors and deemed to be stable, so it got
> upgraded to the "for-linus" branch, and there hasn't been any other
> development since. So now both "for-linus" and
> "experimental-development" are the same commit, but they are very
> much not the same branch!
> 
> So no, don't confuse branch *contents* with branch *descriptions*.

I don't think the suggestion was about annotating the branch tip as a 
way of describing the branch. Rather, you create a _new_ SHA1 that 
identifies the branch (e.g. SHA1(branch_name) ), and then annotate 
_that_ SHA1. As I said, that _can_ be done with the notes 
infrastructure, but - as Ted noted - there might be better solutions to 
storing branch descriptions.

...Johan

-- 
Johan Herland, <[email-masked]>
www.herland.net