Re: ChangeLog and the release branch

[David Engster]

Eli Zaretskii writes:
>> From: David Engster <address@hidden>
>> Cc: Yagnesh Raghava Yakkala <address@hidden>,
>> address@hidden, address@hidden, Paul Eggert
>
>> <address@hidden>
>> Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2015 12:50:46 +0100
>> 
>> > How do you store the diffs in Git notes?  You can't easily write diffs
>> > by hand, so some script is needed to generate them and put them there.
>> 
>> I don't think you would store a diff there but the complete, corrected
>> ChangeLog.
>
> That, too, needs some help, no?  It's easy to format ChangeLog entries
> when actually editing a ChangeLog file.  It's probably harder to do
> that when editing a Git note.

Yes, AFAIK there's no support for git notes in Emacs.

>> If someone is volunteering to actually set this up and deal with the
>> aftermath of people struggling with 'git notes', then yes.
>
> Could you tell what that "struggling" entails?  I never used Git
> notes, so I don't know what difficulties and gotchas this could
> present.

See above: no support in plain Emacs, so people would have to do it via
CLI or some other means. And last I checked, which admittedly was years
ago, notes were poorly supported by git. Notes are a bit similar to
tags, meaning you have to explicitly push to the 'refs/tags'
refspec. Fortunately, you don't have to know that, because 'git push'
has the '--tags' switch which does that automatically. But there's no
such switch for notes, so you have to explicitly push to
'refs/notes'. It even gets more weird when you want to 'fetch' notes,
which requires you to say something like

  git fetch origin refs/notes/*:refs/notes/*

On top of that, there's no real support for merging notes. Maybe things
have improved in the meantime, but we can't count on people to always
use up-to-date git versions.

-David