We are happy to announce that Bitbucket 6.2 has repository descriptions!

Hi!
Any news around that?
Thanks
Gonchik

@Michael Giroux, I believe they added something like that to the git config on disk. See BSERV-3972

The README file appears in the source tree and should be reserved for the user.

Every git repository created in Stash contains a .git/description file that at the moment contains nothing useful.  Stash could easily provide some useful information in the .git/description file.

At our site, we use a lot of bash scripts to traverse the git repos for various reasons.  if you think having a 2 level hierarchy is limited, try to figure out what the shared/data/repositories/1132 git repo contains.  It would be very useful if Bitbucket would store some information in the description file.

project:

repository:

Other information might be useful as well.

This information is available via REST API, but that is not very convenient when trying to script through the entire set of repositories.

I think pulling context out of the README is a great idea for encouraging good readmes, but it would be very hard to do correctly.

A README.md for a project foobar often starts with # foo bar or badges. Deciding how much to take out of the README, and what styling to remove, would be a hard problem.

Given that there's already precedent for descriptions of projects, I think a simple plain text description would work better. This is GitHub's approach, and it works well there.

A repo description is essentially a subtitle. The readme title is likely to repeat the repo name. A repo description might be "a pure Python foobar implementation" or "low-level optimised foobar parser", giving more information which is probably written later in the readme.

Yes, please. Mainly to be able to get a quick understanding of what's what from with the listing screens. 

Indexing the README is a good idea for searching.  But I agree it might be tough to determine the appropriate snippet to show as a repository description.

Agreed. Just need a simple one liner for description.

If anything were to be pulled automatically from the repo, I think a move to something like having a file named `.bitbucket` or `.repo` in the root would be better as that could later be extended.

// File: '.bitbucket' or '.repo' in the root of the repository

description: Lorem ipsum dolor...
public_url: http://somesite.com
license: MIT
support:
  email: author@somesite.com
  issues: http://jira.somesite.com
  wiki: http://confluence.somesite.com
...

And those could later be pulled into the Bitbucket UI in creative and useful ways.

The composer.json schema (the top level meta data stuff and support layers anyway) is probably a pretty good model. http://composer.json.jolicode.com/ But yaml > json!

There's a free add-on for this:  [Repository descriptions|https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/at.apogeum.stash.repodesc/server/overview]

It lets you type in a description on the repo settings page.   Stephan accepted a PR I submitted a couple weeks ago (but he hasn't updated the screenshots yet) and so it also now includes some data extracted from the repo's most recent commit.

Here's a screenshot of this free add-on in action:

It really only needs to be a single line summary. README files tend to be much more descriptive than that. Is it really so hard to just had an extra field per repository in the database?

+1

Using a portion of a README suggests that this would impose some requirements on the README file formatting in order to extract an appropriate repository description.  That seems unreasonable to me, especially when only a single line description is needed. Bad idea.

Indexing the README is a good idea for searching.  But I agree it might be tough to determine the appropriate snippet to show as a repository description.