Just to comment on one of the issues in the thread: not everyone uses a command line editor or even an editor which can be easily invoked from the command line

Just to comment on one of the issues in the thread: not everyone uses a command line editor or even an editor which can be easily invoked from the command line (though I do), so requiring a special command, "git edit-link", to edit some inherently textual data that seems to work perfectly well being stored as a normal text file in the repository, is a little gross.