Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] git-series: track changes to a patch series over time

From: Josh Triplett <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 06:00:55 -0700

On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 01:44:44PM +0100, Richard Ipsum wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 04:04:26AM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote:
> > I hope to use git notes with git-series in the future, by putting
> > another gitlink under the git-series for notes related to the series.
> > I'd intended that for more persistent notes; putting them in the series
> > solves some of the problems related to notes refs, pushing/pulling, and
> > collaboration.  Using notes for review comments makes sense as well,
> > whether in a series or in a separate ref.
> 
> Sounds interesting, can you explain how this works in more detail?

The tree within a git-series commit includes a blob "cover" for the
cover letter, a gitlink "base" for the base commit, and a gitlink
"series" for the top of the series.  I could add a gitlink "notes",
which acts like a notes ref; then, each version of the series would have
its own notes ref.  As with the series, git-series would track the
"history of history"; since git-notes themselves use git history to
store a set of notes, git-series would store the history of the notes.
So if you add, remove, or change a note, git-series would track that as
a change to the notes ref.  If you merge/rebase/etc the notes ref to
merge notes, git-series would track that too.  A different series would
have a different set of notes, so you wouldn't be limited to
one notes ref per repository.

This doesn't solve the problem of merging notes, but it *does* mean you
have a full history of the changes to notes, not just the notes
themselves.

Something similar might work for the Gerrit notesdb.

> > > I've been considering taking the perl-notedb prototype and writing
> > > a C library for it with bindings for other languages (i.e. Rust).
> > 
> > A C library based on libgit2 seems like a good idea; ideally the
> > bindings could interoperate with git2-rs.  (Alternatively, Rust can
> > *export* a C interface, so you could write directly with git2-rs. :) )
> 
> Certainly a fair alternative, though it may arguably be safer to write
> the C and export to other languages, as cool as Rust looks it's not
> established the way C is, so may be a slightly riskier foundation,
> in my view.

I was mostly joking there.  Rust makes that potentially reasonable,
unlike most languages that can consume but not easily provide a C API,
but that doesn't make it the ideal solution quite yet. :)

> And ofcourse in C we have native access to libgit2.

Right.

> > One of the items on my long-term TODO list is a completely federated
> > GitHub; I've been looking at other aspects of that, but federated
> > reviews/comments/etc seem critical to that as well.
>
> I agree.