Pushing git-notes to one specific remote via pre-push hook
I've recently started using git notes as a good way to track metadata associated with the code that's likely of no interest to anyone else, and would only litter git-log if was comitted and tracked in the repo as some .txt file.
But that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be backed-up, shared and merged between different places where you yourself work on and use that code from.
Since I have a git mirror on my own host (as you do with distributed scm), and always clone from there first, adding other "free internet service" remotes like github, codeberg, etc later, it seems like a natural place to push such notes to, as you'd always pull them from there with the repo.
That is not straightforward to configure in git to do on basic "git push" however, because "push" operation there works with "[<repository> [<refspec>...]]" destination concept. I.e. you give it a single remote for where to push, and any number of specific things to update as "<src>[:<dst>]" refspecs.
So when "git push" is configured with "origin" having multiple "url =" lines under it in .git/config file (like home-url + github + codeberg), you don't get to specify "push main+notes to url-A, but only main to url-B" - all repo URLs get same refs, as they are under same remote.
Obvious fix conceptually is to run different "git push" commands to different remotes, but that's a hassle, and even if stored as an alias, it'd clash with muscle memory that'll keep typing "git push" out of habit.
Alternative is to maybe override git-push command itself with some alias, but git explicitly does not allow that, probably for good reasons, so that's out as well.
git-push does run hooks however, and those can do the extra pushes depending on the URL, so that's an easy solution I found for this:
#!/bin/dash
set -e
notes_remote=home
notes_url=$(git remote get-url "$notes_remote")
notes_ref=$(git notes get-ref)
push_remote=$1 push_url=$2
[ "$push_url" = "$notes_url" ] || exit 0
master_push= master_oid=$(git rev-parse master)
while read local_ref local_oid remote_ref remote_oid; do
[ "$local_oid" = "$master_oid" ] && master_push=t && break || continue
done
[ -n "$master_push" ] || exit 0
echo "--- notes-push [$notes_remote]: start -> $notes_ref ---"
git push --no-verify "$notes_remote" "$notes_ref"
echo "--- notes-push [$notes_remote]: success ---"
That's a "pre-push" hook, which pushes notes-branch only to "home" remote, when running a normal "git push" command to a "master" branch (to be replaced with "main" in some repos).
Idea is to only augment "normal" git-push, and don't bother running this on every weirder updates or tweaks, keeping git-notes generally in sync between different places where you can use them, with no cognitive overhead in a day-to-day usage.
As a side-note - while these notes are normally attached to commits, for something more global like "my todo-list for this project" not tied to specific ref that way, it's easy to attach it to some descriptive tag like "todo", and use with e.g. git notes edit todo, and track in the repo as well.