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Date:   Wed, 30 Oct 2019 16:28:35 -0400
From:   Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
To:     Denton Liu <liu.denton@gmail.com>
Cc:     Git Mailing List <git@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: git branch --edit-description a custom file
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On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 11:39:50AM -0700, Denton Liu wrote:

> It seems like everyone working on git.git has their own patch management
> system. Currently, I keep all of my branch-specific configurations
> (including CC lists) and patches in a worktree within the repo so that I
> can keep my configs synced around on different computers.
> 
> One thing that's missing about this setup is that I would like to
> version my branch descriptions as well since I use those to generate
> cover letters. Unfortunately, `git branch --edit-description` only
> operates on .git/config.
> 
> As a workaround, I rewrote `git branch --edit-description` as a
> shell-script that can operate on any config file but I feel like a more
> general solution should be warranted.
> 
> Would changing the option to `git branch --edit-description[=<config>]`
> make sense, where the `<config>` is optional but if it's specified,
> it'll operate on that file instead of the .git/config.

That makes sense to me (though I don't use branch descriptions myself).
I actually wish a lot of auto-written config (like branch.*.merge) was
written to a file besides .git/config, and then just included. It would
make it easier to keep your actual config file cleaner (I usually take
the opposite route and version-control my own config in a separate file
that I include from .git/config).

> Alternately, would it make sense to support a $GIT_CONFIG environment
> variable globally? That is, when $GIT_CONFIG is specified, git will
> read/write from $GIT_CONFIG instead of .git/config? It'd be a little
> heavy-handed for me to make the change just for this one use-case but
> perhaps people may find other uses for it?

We used to have such a thing, and it opened a lot of weird corner cases.
Just thinking about the case you mentioned: would people be confused if
"GIT_CONFIG=foo git branch --edit-description" doesn't respect
core.editor specified in .git/config?

-Peff