For the purpose of attribution it may be a good idea to include some metadata in patches. I’m thinking at least an author and comments field. Perhaps also URL and license fields, although those can also just be entered in the comments field.
Here are four options:
Store the data in a new
.gaia
chunk. This would be lossy though, it is not preserved when editing patches. The metadata would need to be configured globally and saved automatically. This may mean that someone else’s patch gets re-attributed if it is saved again. However one probably wouldn’t normally do this and then redistribute it.Store the data in the unused effects parameters. There’s 150 bytes of them. Twitter’s character limit is 140 :). It would be kind of abusing those parameters though; they are a limited commodity and who knows what else they could be useful for in the future. And a future firmware update might start using them (though unlikely). Another option would be to store it in the unused arpeggio notes and steps. However their amount is variable, possibly zero. And again, rather abusive, though slightly less so.
Maintain an online database linking patch hashes to submitted metadata. That would mean a server needs to be built and kept alive, and it won’t work in offline environments.
Do not store anything at all. Perhaps it is better handled at the distribution level (as it is now); accompany the patch download with a description, or distribute it in a zip archive with a text file.