Introduce commit notes

Commit notes are blobs which are shown together with the commit
message.  These blobs are taken from the notes ref, which you can
configure by the config variable core.notesRef, which in turn can
be overridden by the environment variable GIT_NOTES_REF.

The notes ref is a branch which contains "files" whose names are
the names of the corresponding commits (i.e. the SHA-1).

The rationale for putting this information into a ref is this: we
want to be able to fetch and possibly union-merge the notes,
maybe even look at the date when a note was introduced, and we
want to store them efficiently together with the other objects.

This patch has been improved by the following contributions:
- Thomas Rast: fix core.notesRef documentation
- Tor Arne Vestbø: fix printing of multi-line notes
- Alex Riesen: Using char array instead of char pointer costs less BSS
- Johan Herland: Plug leak when msg is good, but msglen or type causes return

Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>
Signed-off-by: Tor Arne Vestbø <tavestbo@trolltech.com>
Signed-off-by: Johan Herland <johan@herland.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

get_commit_notes(): Plug memory leak when 'if' triggers, but not because of read_sha1_file() failure

1 files changed, 13 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/config.txt b/Documentation/config.txt
index cd1781498..57d64e4d9 100644
--- a/Documentation/config.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config.txt
@@ -454,6 +454,19 @@ On some file system/operating system combinations, this is unreliable.
 Set this config setting to 'rename' there; However, This will remove the
 check that makes sure that existing object files will not get overwritten.
 
+core.notesRef::
+	When showing commit messages, also show notes which are stored in
+	the given ref.  This ref is expected to contain files named
+	after the full SHA-1 of the commit they annotate.
++
+If such a file exists in the given ref, the referenced blob is read, and
+appended to the commit message, separated by a "Notes:" line.  If the
+given ref itself does not exist, it is not an error, but means that no
+notes should be printed.
++
+This setting defaults to "refs/notes/commits", and can be overridden by
+the `GIT_NOTES_REF` environment variable.
+
 add.ignore-errors::
 	Tells 'git-add' to continue adding files when some files cannot be
 	added due to indexing errors. Equivalent to the '--ignore-errors'