[Kde-scm-interest] Accountability, concrete suggestion

[Robert Wohlrab]

On Thursday 15 January 2009 02:15:22 Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
> Disclaimer:
> I'm not the best guy to be answering these questions.  I followed the list
> through the last posting of the notes feature, but I only scanned the
> patches an am not currently testing them myself.
I got in contact with Johannes Schindelin and he answered my question about 
the fetching and pushing of notes.

> On Wednesday 14 January 2009, Robert Wohlrab <robert.wohlrab at gmx.de> wrote
>
> about 'Re: [Kde-scm-interest] Accountability, concrete suggestion':
> >Ok, compiled the next branch now and tried to work with it
>
> If this is the only feature from next you want to try out, it might
> be "safer" to just checkout master, merge that particular branch, and
> compile that.
Maybe will do that later

> >It seems that this stuff is only useful on servers... see the next
> > comments
>
> Well, fetch/push just haven't been modified to manage the additional refs
> namespace automatically.  I'm not sure this is a really good idea either
> until gc/prune have the desired behavior -- should objects only reachable
> through a note be kept?
This is really a good question. I dont think they should keep but then the 
history has to be modified when the notes should also be removed... not really 
the best idea. Currently exists no such referencing behaviour between notes 
and commits... Maybe the git people will discuss about that issues and find a 
good way to handle it :D

[...]
> >> >- An update for a note will automatically downloaded by a pull?
> >>
> >> Not sure about this.  Since there is currently only one "notes ref",
> >> it's unlikely to be overwritten by pull in the default setup.
> >
> >No, I wasnt able to pull or push anything from the notes ref. A clone
> > also doesnt clone that ref. So it seems pretty useless when we try to
> > check commits on the client side. For the server it wouldn't be a big
> > problem to write into his notes when someone commits it and verify it on
> > demand.
>
> Most likely it's just that fetch/push haven't been modified to handle the
> refs/notes namespace.  ISTR that they currently only fetch/push
> refs/heads "normally" and then refs/tags specially.
Correct. Johannes send me following snippet:

        $ git checkout refs/notes/commits
        $ git pull remote refs/notes/commits
        <possibly resolve merge conflicts>

> I may get around to testing a version of git with notes enabled tonight, so
> I can try it out but, you might experiment with explicitly naming the
> notes refs are part of your fetch/push.  Something like:
>
> git push $remote refs/notes/commits
> # Create a new checkout, clone $remote then...
> git fetch $remote refs/notes/commits
> # See if notes show up correctly.
-- 
Robert Wohlrab