[kgb-maintainers] Bug#706375: kgb-client-git: support for git-notes

[Helmut Grohne]

Package: kgb-client-git
Version: 1.26-1
Severity: wishlist

Dear Maintainer,

It would be nice if kgb-client-git would gain support for git-notes.
Technically this is a branch that usually lives under
refs/notes/commits. As such the current behaviour is of kgb is an error
message "*** Unknown type of update to ...". The contents of a git-notes
branch is a single tree with commit ids as blob names. When running git
show or git log the notes corresponding the commit are appended to the
log message.

The commit messages on the refs/notes/commits branch are automatically
generated and generally useless. Posting them to irc is not useful. What
would be actually interesting is the change in the contents of the
notes. Even though they reside in blobs and therefore permit arbitrary
binary data, they usually are plain text (and the same applies to normal
commit messages). To implement this feature a new sub similar to the
branch_update sub would have to calculate the diff of a notes update and
post it to irc if the length is reasonable.

Since the notes feature was primarily intended for local notes, the
remote interaction is not that obvious. I am giving a brief summary
here. One of the first issues is that notes are not automatically
fetched with git fetch. To achieve that add a line like
"fetch = +refs/notes/commits:refs/notes/remote-commit-notes". Then one
can incorporate the remote notes using "git notes merge
remote-commit-notes". To get your own notes to the remote server (and
hopefully trigger kgb in future) you can use "git push origin
refs/notes/commits".

Helmut