What would you put in such a note to identify the source?
I could see the client used for calculation being useful. Even better would be if the client (in particular Picard) could generate such a note automatically.
I usually write a note like “CD in drive, case on table.”
Shouldn’t a disc ID always come from the actual disc? Maybe it would be better if the user had to confirm that he picked the correct release.
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but why would we need to know where the editor borrowed or bought his copy?
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The physical edition will be different in different countries \ continents. It can be important for some as the cover will have different notes on it, different copyright details. Even if the actual musical tracks are the same, the package is often different.
And then some artists will release totally different versions of an album for different markets.
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It enables another editor to potentially/theoretically (although I admit: not practically, for far most people) go to the same source and get the/a copy of it. IMO, the more detailed the lineage provided, the better.
Do note, though, that sometimes “other editors” include your future self. And if you got the copy from a library, chances are you still have access to that library a year from now (though maybe not 10 years), in case something comes up where something additional needs to be checked.
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@IvanDobsky, we’re not talking here about different releases, but about multiple disc IDs attached to a single release:
Freso’s example includes a library URL, which could be useful for verification by another editor who had access to that same library and thus could get the same physical copy.
Another thought: if I have scanned my physical disc and uploaded it to cover art, it could be potentially useful to know that the disc ID came from that same disc.
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Exactly. A different packaging would mean it’s a different release. Countries, continents etc are all information that should be assigned to the release and based on these the editor will need to identfiy it before assigning the Disc ID - or add a new release if it’s not in the database.
The necessary data to identify it correctly needs to be there before the ID is added. Otherwise the ID will be worthless.
This is why we have to make sure that the editor has picked the correct release.
That does sound fairly unlikely, but then again I simply buy CDs and never sell them. 
In case I would need to find another copy, all the necessary information would ideally be in the release’s entry…
As different cover art would result in a different release, the use will probably be rather limited.
I get your point. I often find I am adding a new European Release to a Release Group, and I attach a discID. Shortly followed by a full set of scans from my copy. Once done I then have a new European version with a single discID.
I then look across at other Releases in the same Group and see a GB or US release with 15 discIDs attached and wildly varying times. Among them the discID that matches my European version.
This now leaves a dilemma. Was my discID purely European? Or was an identical disc released in the US? Or, more likely, have users just been attaching all the discIDs to the one release here with the prettiest artwork?
It is not just reading the edit note of the discID, but of that whole release associated with it. Checking the whole Edit History of a release can quite quickly show if the discIDs and Artwork appeared at the same time from the same editor or came from totally separate sources.
If I am editing an older release, often when I am adding my artwork I then go hunt down my discID anyway and hit the button to set the track times. A way to let anyone reading that edit history see the discID that is associated with the scanned artwork.
I have seen some editors go as far as add their discIDs into the annotations, but that then backfires when a lazy person copies the release or merges it and doesn’t clean up. I’ve seen a single annotation copied across multiple releases… but then that was shown up in the edit history.
Edit notes always need to be read in context. 
Especially as there is a lot of work going into adding a release amd sometimes those notes get spread out.
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The most likely reason is that when NGS was released back in 2011 a lot of releases that had previously been stored as “release events” were split into separate releases. Since there was no way to identify which release had which discID, the discIDs were all copied to every newly-split release.
Some details are in the wiki.
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Interesting bit of history. I have only been here since Dec 2017 so it is good to get that 2011 date in my head when reading Edit Histories. I had worked out that there was a very different meaning of “Release Date” in the past.
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Yes — at that point a release was something more like a “tracklist”, with discIDs being simply a way to look up the correct track titles, rather than a way of identifying a physical release. Much more focused on tagging instead of being a music database. (Although the tagging tools and even tagging technology were much more primitive then too)
I maintain that it would have been better to just delete all the discIDs and let people re-connect them after the NGS transition, but of course that would have its own different problems.
For your example of the European release, one possible solution is to remove your “known-good” discID from the other releases. But of course its hard to be confident that the same discID doesn’t exist elsewhere too…
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It’s never too late 
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There has been disc id calculation bugs so client name and version would be good to know.
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I think by source, he meant the identification of which CD edition it was:
Catalogue number(s) and barcode(s), at least. 