Is there a list of not-really-known features of git (such as git notes, git trailers, etc.)? I have been using git for decades but I have not yet came across of these two.
stuartd · 4m ago
The post links to a GitHub page, which contains this:
> I just blogged about the new git-notes functionality over at the [Pro Git blog](dead link)
I tried using git notes for distributed secure reviews but hit some road block with merges. It is a good idea that has limitations that limit its adoption
These are key-value structures data that can be included on a commit when it is created. These are used by some systems for attaching metadata. For example, Gerrit uses this for attaching its Change-Id.
oftenwrong · 4h ago
One more similar feature from a different system: PostgreSQL COMMENT
Basically the original rendering makes me look incompetent to a casual skimmer. Plus tools like JetBrains IDEs can suss out what comments belong to what DDL anyway.
eastbound · 3m ago
I love PostgreSQL content. I once used them in a commercial product where table and column comments would contain metadata. The product is now dead. I took this event as a cautionary tale that when we feel super empowered as developers, we often miss the market.
stephenlf · 3h ago
I love PostgreSQL COMMENT. I built a prototype app for a buddy with Supabase and added a COMMENT to every table.
codesnik · 2h ago
with supabase it is almost essential. But adding comments with migrations is somewhat tedious, unless you're writing actual sql. Like, you know, with supabase.
Pxtl · 2h ago
MS SQL has a similar feature called Extended Properties but the API is quite tedious.
I don't know why they mandate it to be the last trailer unless it's for regex reasons
imiric · 2h ago
Interesting, I wasn't familiar with this feature.
I'm a big fan of conventional commits, and trailers seem like a better way of adding such metadata.
Is adding them manually to the commit message functionally equivalent to using the `--trailer` flag?
wiktor-k · 42m ago
> Is adding them manually to the commit message functionally equivalent to using the `--trailer` flag?
Yes. The flag is perfect for scripts but it's exactly equivalent to adding the text manually.
_flux · 1h ago
I used git notes for marking which of my commits in my branch I had run the unit tests for (and thus my script would skip those). This was useful when working with open source upstream where you want the massage the branch to perfection with git rebase -i.
It seems git trailers would now be the better place to put that information.
Regarding change ids: I wish git itself had those, as then also the tooling would understand them. Identifying commits by their commit messages is fragile, in particular when you may update those for an MR. While commit id truly identifies the commit in a unique way, it is not a useful identifier when the same changes could be moved on top of some other commit.
edit: Oh it looks like they are actually part of the commit, whereas notes aren't, so it wouldn't be a good replacement for my use.
masklinn · 55m ago
> Regarding change ids: I wish git itself had those, as then also the tooling would understand them. Identifying commits by their commit messages is fragile, in particular when you may update those for an MR. While commit id truly identifies the commit in a unique way, it is not a useful identifier when the same changes could be moved on top of some other commit.
They don't need git support, but it might eventually become first-class.
arxanas · 1h ago
One trick for running tests in rebase-heavy workflows is to use the tree hash of the commit as the cache key, rather than attach metadata the commit itself.
- That way, tests will be skipped when the contents of the commit are the same, while remaining insensitive to things like changes to the commit message or squashes.
- But they'll re-run in situations like reordering commits (for just the reordered range, and then the cache will work again for any unchanged commits after that). I think that's important because notes will follow the commits around as they're rewritten, even if the logical contents are now different due to reordering? Amending a commit or squashing two non-adjacent commits may also have unexpected behavior if it merges the notes from both sides and fails to invalidate the cache?
I've also seen use-cases might prefer to use/add other things to the cache key:
- The commit message: my most recent workflow involves embedding certain test commands in the message, so I actually do want to re-run the tests when the test commands change.
- The patch ID: if you specifically don't want to re-run tests when you rebase/merge with the main branch, or otherwise reorder commits.
Unfortunately, I don't have a good solution for those at present.
adregan · 2h ago
While I mostly try to go with the flow, I do get frustrated that there are more natural places to integrate with a issue tracking system like trailers, but they are so far off issue trackers’ happy path that it’s not worth it.
I think the problem is exacerbated by the fact that issue trackers follow fashion; and it’s more common that you are using the flavor of the week; and that flavor isn’t close to feature complete; and new features get added at a glacial pace.
I suppose this is a long winded way of stating how annoyed I am with branch names derived from linear ticket’s titles for tracking purposes, and I wish I could use some other form of metadata to associate commits with an issue, so that I could have more meaningful PR titles (enforced that I must use the linear branch name as the title).
Though I’ll admit that it’s an issue of a size that’s more appropriate to gripe about on the internet than try to change.
dotancohen · 1h ago
Everything you are arguing against is convention, not intrinsic. If you have a better way of doing things, do it that way. Or convince your employer to do it that way.
EPWN3D · 3h ago
Yeah I love trailers. I remember trying to use notes for certain things, and they were just kind of a pain (though I cannot remember exactly what roadblocks I hit). Trailers met my needs nicely.
stephenlf · 3h ago
This is fantastic. This could really beef up CI with ticket numbers and stuff.
cmrdporcupine · 2h ago
Side note: I really miss Gerritt from my time working at GOOG, but man is its deployment story kinda crap in the 2020s. I tried to run an instance locally and was hoping to integrate it with my github hosted repo ended up just frustrated.
Is there anything equivalent -- that handles tracking changes over commits etc better than GH -- that is more actively developed and friendly for integration with GH? I hate GH's code review tools with the heat of 10,000 suns.
ezst · 1h ago
I think phabricator was doing a decent job at it while it lasted, don't know where they are at since IIRC it got abandoned and then forked.
The best way to track meta history is to have it baked into the VCS, so here Mercurial is king, and heptapod (a friendly fork of Gitlab meant to support Mercurial repos and concepts) apparently does a good job at it since it's used for Mercurial's own development (after they transitioned from mailing lists to Gerrit? to phabricator to Heptapod)
homebrewer · 3h ago
Also supported by Forgejo since version 10 (released in January of this year):
Git notes are only cool if you frequently add text to a commit after the commit has happened and visible to others.
The Acked-By and mailing list discussion link examples don't seem to be good examples. Both of these are likely already known when the commit is made. And git commit message basically can have an unlimited length, so you could very well copy all the discussions about the commit that happened on a forge into the commit message itself.
One use case I think might be a better example is to add a git note to a commit that has later been reverted.
hinkley · 16m ago
The common failure mode is commit messages proudly proclaiming they fixed a bug that they did not. And linking knock-on bugs created by their fixes to one bug.
Maybe I’m weird that way. I’ve had too many coworkers who don’t really even look at annotations to remind themselves why this code was written in the first place. They will just yolo and hope nobody ties the problems back to them.
But once you’ve dealt with an irate customer who waited impatiently for a bug to be fixed, and only to have the bug be reintroduced a short time later, you may become more circumspect about bug fixes.
There’s often a refactor needed to fix multiple bugs at once. There’s often refactor can open up new feature opportunities, or performance improvements.
Zambyte · 3h ago
> The Acked-By and mailing list discussion link examples don't seem to be good examples. Both of these are likely already known when the commit is made.
Discussion regarding a commit (is: review) and acknowledgment of a commit cannot happen before the commit has been made.
> One use case I think might be a better example is to add a git note to a commit that has later been reverted.
Commit messages are better for this use case. When you got blame a file, it shows the latest changes for that file. If a commit reverts changes from another commit, the newer commit that reverts the older commit will show up in the blame.
hinkley · 9m ago
You’re treating a commit as an atom, which is not true in patch based git situations like Linux.
Most of the rest of us do not work this way, but they still do. The rest of us also only have to deal with three way merges most of the time, instead of octopus merges. Though I jokingly call, “fixing an incorrect three way merge” a “five way merge” because you end up doing a star shaped pattern of diffs to re-resolve the code to retain the intents of all three versions. A to merge, B to merge, merge to HEAD~, A to HEAD~ and B to HEAD~
saghm · 3h ago
> Discussion regarding a commit (is: review) and acknowledgment of a commit cannot happen before the commit has been made.
It can't happen before the commit on a feature branch, but it can happen before merging the commit back to the main development branch. Given that a rebase or merge commit is already frequently necessary to integrate changes from a feature branch after review is finished, I don't see why this type of info couldn't be added (or even required to exist) before merging.
Pxtl · 2h ago
The history-destroying problems of rebasing are a rant on their own.
hinkley · 8m ago
Can you say more? I use rebase to avoid history destruction/obscuration. Do you mean squash? If so then I agree.
Zambyte · 2h ago
That's a UI problem with git making it hard to find hidden commits (pre-rebase). The commits aren't destroyed, they are hidden. The Jujutsu CLI is nice because it fixes this UI problem.
0x696C6961 · 4h ago
Discussion can keep happening after the commit is created.
lucasoshiro · 2h ago
There are many "Git's coolest, most unloved feature", e.g.: bisect, pickaxe, reflog, range-diff, archive, annotated tags, etc. Sadly they are often forgotten as many people thing of Git only as a glorified Google Drive...
steve_adams_86 · 10m ago
Ha, I expected to know the features you were going to list, but got surprise attacked by pickaxe. What the hell? I guess I shouldn’t be so confident
knallfrosch · 2h ago
Git notes is redundant since you need a higher-level project management tool to track features anyway. Roadmaps, feature hierarchy and non-technical details. Think of any big tracker or Jira.
I think that's fine. Unix philosophy is to focus on one thing and do that well.
hinkley · 4m ago
A project management tool that uses Notes would make IDE integration easier though.
I vaguely recall dismissing Notes as a solution to my problems. I may be recollecting some of this wrong, but IIRC the problem with Notes is that they aren’t batteries included. It’s easier to cajole devs into using new tools if the setup is simple and it doesn’t complicate their workflow. Notes fails this litmus test. Set it on by default and make it come down with pull and up with push instead of a separate activity.
pydry · 1h ago
In many cases this is because those features arent actually that useful and they are frivolities surrounding a workhorse.
hinkley · 1m ago
I use a lot of features of my tools only when the shit hits the fan. People appreciate me doing it quickly. What they don’t appreciate is when I get mad at them for polluting those tools during their normal activities. Like destroying git history by renaming files incorrectly.
It’s hard to explain to them that things like “mis en place” aren’t OCD but table stakes for sophisticated activities.
b0a04gl · 4h ago
i use git notes pretty heavily in my current role. started as an experiment to keep track of internal code reviews without flooding the commit message or making PRs for everything. i tag every commit with context what tickets it maps to, infra constraints, links to incident threads if it's a fix. all lives in the repo. this avoids the need to grep slack or jira just to know why a line changed. nce you start using it at scale, you realise how little you need the platform UI at all. we keep talking about reproducibility in builds, but never in intent. maybe this is where that starts
smallpipe · 2h ago
Shouldn’t that be the commit message ? Or is the goal to also link forward in time, such as “we realised this commit introduced bug #123” ?
b0a04gl · 2h ago
haha wait do you actually read long commit messages( more than a line) all the way through? like line-by-line, imo commit msg = tweet, git note = blog post.
smallpipe · 1h ago
In my line of work a bug could cost multiple millions. I do read them. I write long ones. I would love if my colleagues started writing longer ones too.
mojifwisi · 1h ago
That seems more complicated than just adding the info in the commit message. It's not like Git doesn't have flags for trimming commit messages when reading them (--oneline).
noelwelsh · 4h ago
This is a UI problem, not a lack-of-knowledge problem. If Github's UI surfaced notes they would instantly get much more usage.
This is great! And how did I not know about this? My favorite days are when I learn something new. Even better are when I learn that I was wrong and change my mind to improve my thinking. So meta!
Git notes would be ideal for annotating commits that contain commit hashes used as breadcrumbs to inform the developer (usually me months later) about context around previous work. These hashes might have changed due to a rebase or from using disk space optimization tools that rewrite history like these:
These methods are all uniquely terrible in various ways. Most likely user error on my part. I need this technique:
1. Choose a range of commit hashes (or hashes before a commit) and remove them. This can be useful when splitting repos, for example on projects that started as backend+frontend where the frontend is being forked off in a new repo and the older backend portion needs to be removed from it for security/privacy.
2. Rebase all branches (including those that crossed the deleted portion) to preserve their structure but start/end as recently as possible. Optionally discard branches that were created and merged entirely within the deleted ported, unless they're the trunk of other branches that merge after the deleted portion.
3. Search for old commit hashes in commit messages and update them to the new hashes while rebasing.
4. Bonus points for updating stashes (or other git features) having any commit hashes in their names. Also for importing/exporting a list of important commit hashes for use in project management, such as updating hashes in comments on kanban boards like Jira.
5. More bonus points for searching for large files (such as app.js or other build artifacts) so that they can be stripped from commits in branches, preferably not on a main trunk like master.
If you followed this far, I could also use a technique that rebases merged branches so that they form a series of D shapes instead of overlapping B shapes (this is useful during git bisect). Ideally this would happen automatically or be enforced via rules on sites like GitHub and GitLab. I always rebase my branches before merging, but others can't be bothered.
Where I'm going with this: I git reset and git cherry-pick constantly in my own branches before merging, so that each branch has a clean work history like the trunk. I think of this as quantum committing, because I keep exploring the problem space until I find a solution that collapses (merges) into the history.
The problem is that git GUIs are inadequate for this work. I need to be able to cut/copy/paste commits, drag and drop them for reordering, etc. It should also derive the commit diff needed to make a commit match a branch (or folder) rather than throwing a conflict in my face, so that it operates more like Apple's Time Machine. If I had this app, I could simply select all commits that I wanted to delete, it would ask me "this rewrites history, are you sure?", and then delete them and do the right thing for affected branches. It would also have infinite undo powered by git reflog.
The idea being that commit hashes should not take priority - it's all about the information. We should never be trapped by the state of the repo, because that creates anxiety.
So we're missing a tool to orchestrate git the way that Kubernetes orchestrates Docker.
legends2k · 3h ago
I discovered notes from the man pages around 2020 but didn't use them as it was primarily a local repo feature. By default they don't get pushed or fetched. If course, one can configure it such that it's pushed and fetched, but that's a team decision and mine didn't vote for it.
cesarb · 2h ago
Git notes were used at the LibreOffice project to track, for each commit to the Apache OpenOffice repository (which they mirrored as a branch on LibreOffice's git repository), whether that commit was not relevant (for instance, changes to the build system which LibreOffice had long replaced with a better one), duplicated an already existing change on LibreOffice (often from many years earlier), or, the least common case, that it was accepted into LibreOffice (and which commit did the cherry-pick). You can still see it for itself at https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/log/?h=aoo/tru... (that git front-end still displays notes).
(They stopped tracking these changes a few years ago, probably because the pace of changes to Apache OpenOffice slowed down to a trickle, and there's no longer much to be gained by cherry-picking these few changes.)
lars512 · 1h ago
I had a good use case at Our World In Data for the public data pipeline, where one repo had the pipeline and one git-lfs repo had the build output of the pipeline. A git note added to a commit to the code pipeline recorded the hash identifying the built data.
Overall it felt elegant, and needed no maintenance after setting it up, but honestly it was never used. I think the need to look back in time was rarer than expected, and git notes being hidden by default didn’t help for awareness.
paffdragon · 2h ago
I wrote a little tool for versioning based on conventional commits that uses git note for a version override. In case you want to force a specific version instead of the one autodetected, you can add a git note with the version you want.
This was useful when migrating a piece of functionality into its own repo and you want to preserve history. Adding these forced version tags into commits would be quite messy in the new repo where you switch to a new versioning scheme.
r-bryan · 38m ago
Methinks Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment finds some empirical support here.
Shank · 3h ago
Why did GitHub remove support for them, and how do we get this decision reversed?
fmbb · 3h ago
I think the answer is in the link.
Making git notes more usable would make it easier to migrate from GitHub. It would make you less locked in.
mtillman · 1h ago
OP suggested that they are unused because of the awkward interface but I find that if you were taking notes in text about a release, you can easily pipe those notes to Git Notes on commit. This seems easy to me. Am I missing something?
olejorgenb · 4h ago
What happens of you rebase a branch containing commits with notes attached?
I think it would be interesting to add the prompt (or a summary of the prompt) as a note for each commit. This would allow the LLM to later reason about each line of code by going back and checking the notes to mine for requirements, and take those into account when changing the code again.
lozenge · 2h ago
Or just put it in the commit message, after all, it is the human's description of what the commit is supposed to do
remram · 3h ago
In practice I get a lot of value out of referencing commit hashes. If I fix a problem I introduced in a previous commit (for example, commit bumped version, and I forgot to bump it somewhere), my fix will say "amends ab12cd34".
That way when I need to cherry-pick that commit, or do something similar (bump again), I can search for the hash of the commit I'm looking at to find what might be missing.
UI is worse than git-notes but no need for additional setup to sync them.
codesnik · 2h ago
you kinda doing by hand what git commit --fixup could do for you, and what git rebase -i could pick up automatically.
marcodiego · 5h ago
I bet it already exists, but what about an issue tracker in plain text maintained by git itself?
> I bet it already exists, but what about an issue tracker in plain text maintained by git itself?
I have an issue tracker file that can be added to a project. While it's technically plain text, the interface for the file ensures that a format is used, and the format ensures that changes reflect only a single ticket.
Just as long as no one edits the file using a different program, it will work just fine.
If note just for the last commit, would it easier just amend the last commit message to include any note?
Don't need remember another command option.
akoboldfrying · 9h ago
I've been using git for probably 10 years and I didn't know git notes existed. Cool!
> Here is a plea for all forges: make code review metadata available offline, inside git.
I think this will fall on deaf ears as far as commercial forges like GitHub go, since as you yourself observe:
> But much of the value of git repos ends up locked into forges, like GitHub.
For-profit enterprises are not generally excited about commoditising their own value-add. This is not a jab at GitHub -- I think GitHub do everything right (offer a great service, a very generous free tier, and make it possible to extract all your data via API if you want to shift providers). It's just the nature of any commercial operation.
esafak · 5h ago
You have to start a new service that offers that feature as one of its differentiators, then the competitors might add it (back) to catch up.
xeonmc · 4h ago
any reason why Forgejo/Codeberg couldn't/wouldn't adopt this?
Seems like a chicken-and-egg problem. Not enough people know about them because they aren't supported by most providers, and because people don't know about them, there's no pressure for providers to add support for them.
hungryhobbit · 2h ago
Coolest? It's just extra comments...
827a · 3h ago
Why would I choose to stash information like this in the git notes, versus just appending it to the commit message itself?
zygentoma · 3h ago
Because you would not want to write the whole git history starting from the commit you want to stash this info one everytime you want to stash additional info …
Appending information to the commit itself creates a new commit and all the commits that are based on the commit will also have to change consequently.
827a · 3h ago
Ah; so notes don't impact the commit hash? That is a solid reason.
cesarb · 2h ago
Yeah, git notes are AFAIK stashed into their own hidden branch, referencing the original commit by its hash. That is, the git note points to the commit, not the opposite.
Izkata · 1h ago
Kind of. The structure is the same and you can check it out if you want, but it's actually a 3rd directory under "refs" - the other two being "heads" (branches) and "tags". That avoids special-casing with trying to hide branches or conflicting with a branch name a user might make.
> I just blogged about the new git-notes functionality over at the [Pro Git blog](dead link)
The link is archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20100828155504/http://progit.org...
https://alchemists.io/articles/git_trailers
These are key-value structures data that can be included on a commit when it is created. These are used by some systems for attaching metadata. For example, Gerrit uses this for attaching its Change-Id.
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/17/sql-comment.html
This allows you to attach text to various database objects in PostgreSQL.
I wish PostgreSQL had a feature that was more like structured key-value database object metadata that could be edited.
Compare:
https://github.com/jchester/spc-kit/blob/eb2de71d815b0057e20...
To:
https://github.com/jchester/spc-kit/blob/main/sql/02-spc-int...
Basically the original rendering makes me look incompetent to a casual skimmer. Plus tools like JetBrains IDEs can suss out what comments belong to what DDL anyway.
I don't know why they mandate it to be the last trailer unless it's for regex reasons
I'm a big fan of conventional commits, and trailers seem like a better way of adding such metadata.
Is adding them manually to the commit message functionally equivalent to using the `--trailer` flag?
Yes. The flag is perfect for scripts but it's exactly equivalent to adding the text manually.
It seems git trailers would now be the better place to put that information.
Regarding change ids: I wish git itself had those, as then also the tooling would understand them. Identifying commits by their commit messages is fragile, in particular when you may update those for an MR. While commit id truly identifies the commit in a unique way, it is not a useful identifier when the same changes could be moved on top of some other commit.
edit: Oh it looks like they are actually part of the commit, whereas notes aren't, so it wouldn't be a good replacement for my use.
Projects for which mutable changes are a unit of work are working on standardising that: https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAESOdVAspxUJKGAA58i0tvks4ZOfoGf...
They don't need git support, but it might eventually become first-class.
- That way, tests will be skipped when the contents of the commit are the same, while remaining insensitive to things like changes to the commit message or squashes.
- But they'll re-run in situations like reordering commits (for just the reordered range, and then the cache will work again for any unchanged commits after that). I think that's important because notes will follow the commits around as they're rewritten, even if the logical contents are now different due to reordering? Amending a commit or squashing two non-adjacent commits may also have unexpected behavior if it merges the notes from both sides and fails to invalidate the cache?
- This is how my `git test` command works https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless/wiki/Command:-git-...
---
I've also seen use-cases might prefer to use/add other things to the cache key:
- The commit message: my most recent workflow involves embedding certain test commands in the message, so I actually do want to re-run the tests when the test commands change.
- The patch ID: if you specifically don't want to re-run tests when you rebase/merge with the main branch, or otherwise reorder commits.
Unfortunately, I don't have a good solution for those at present.
I think the problem is exacerbated by the fact that issue trackers follow fashion; and it’s more common that you are using the flavor of the week; and that flavor isn’t close to feature complete; and new features get added at a glacial pace.
I suppose this is a long winded way of stating how annoyed I am with branch names derived from linear ticket’s titles for tracking purposes, and I wish I could use some other form of metadata to associate commits with an issue, so that I could have more meaningful PR titles (enforced that I must use the linear branch name as the title).
Though I’ll admit that it’s an issue of a size that’s more appropriate to gripe about on the internet than try to change.
Is there anything equivalent -- that handles tracking changes over commits etc better than GH -- that is more actively developed and friendly for integration with GH? I hate GH's code review tools with the heat of 10,000 suns.
The best way to track meta history is to have it baked into the VCS, so here Mercurial is king, and heptapod (a friendly fork of Gitlab meant to support Mercurial repos and concepts) apparently does a good job at it since it's used for Mercurial's own development (after they transitioned from mailing lists to Gerrit? to phabricator to Heptapod)
https://forgejo.org/2025-01-release-v10-0/#new-features
https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/pulls/4753
The Acked-By and mailing list discussion link examples don't seem to be good examples. Both of these are likely already known when the commit is made. And git commit message basically can have an unlimited length, so you could very well copy all the discussions about the commit that happened on a forge into the commit message itself.
One use case I think might be a better example is to add a git note to a commit that has later been reverted.
Maybe I’m weird that way. I’ve had too many coworkers who don’t really even look at annotations to remind themselves why this code was written in the first place. They will just yolo and hope nobody ties the problems back to them. But once you’ve dealt with an irate customer who waited impatiently for a bug to be fixed, and only to have the bug be reintroduced a short time later, you may become more circumspect about bug fixes.
There’s often a refactor needed to fix multiple bugs at once. There’s often refactor can open up new feature opportunities, or performance improvements.
Discussion regarding a commit (is: review) and acknowledgment of a commit cannot happen before the commit has been made.
> One use case I think might be a better example is to add a git note to a commit that has later been reverted.
Commit messages are better for this use case. When you got blame a file, it shows the latest changes for that file. If a commit reverts changes from another commit, the newer commit that reverts the older commit will show up in the blame.
Most of the rest of us do not work this way, but they still do. The rest of us also only have to deal with three way merges most of the time, instead of octopus merges. Though I jokingly call, “fixing an incorrect three way merge” a “five way merge” because you end up doing a star shaped pattern of diffs to re-resolve the code to retain the intents of all three versions. A to merge, B to merge, merge to HEAD~, A to HEAD~ and B to HEAD~
It can't happen before the commit on a feature branch, but it can happen before merging the commit back to the main development branch. Given that a rebase or merge commit is already frequently necessary to integrate changes from a feature branch after review is finished, I don't see why this type of info couldn't be added (or even required to exist) before merging.
I think that's fine. Unix philosophy is to focus on one thing and do that well.
I vaguely recall dismissing Notes as a solution to my problems. I may be recollecting some of this wrong, but IIRC the problem with Notes is that they aren’t batteries included. It’s easier to cajole devs into using new tools if the setup is simple and it doesn’t complicate their workflow. Notes fails this litmus test. Set it on by default and make it come down with pull and up with push instead of a separate activity.
It’s hard to explain to them that things like “mis en place” aren’t OCD but table stakes for sophisticated activities.
Git notes would be ideal for annotating commits that contain commit hashes used as breadcrumbs to inform the developer (usually me months later) about context around previous work. These hashes might have changed due to a rebase or from using disk space optimization tools that rewrite history like these:
https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/
https://github.com/rtyley/bfg-repo-cleaner
https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo
https://github.com/tiavision/GitRewrite
See also:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5613345/how-to-shrink-th...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1398919/make-git-consume...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2116778/reduce-git-repos...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3119850/is-there-a-way-t...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38789265/git-delete-some...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16057391/git-free-disk-s...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31423525/how-to-reduce-d...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16854425/compact-reposit...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13999191/trimming-huge-g...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4515580/how-do-i-remove-...
These methods are all uniquely terrible in various ways. Most likely user error on my part. I need this technique:
1. Choose a range of commit hashes (or hashes before a commit) and remove them. This can be useful when splitting repos, for example on projects that started as backend+frontend where the frontend is being forked off in a new repo and the older backend portion needs to be removed from it for security/privacy.
2. Rebase all branches (including those that crossed the deleted portion) to preserve their structure but start/end as recently as possible. Optionally discard branches that were created and merged entirely within the deleted ported, unless they're the trunk of other branches that merge after the deleted portion.
3. Search for old commit hashes in commit messages and update them to the new hashes while rebasing.
4. Bonus points for updating stashes (or other git features) having any commit hashes in their names. Also for importing/exporting a list of important commit hashes for use in project management, such as updating hashes in comments on kanban boards like Jira.
5. More bonus points for searching for large files (such as app.js or other build artifacts) so that they can be stripped from commits in branches, preferably not on a main trunk like master.
If you followed this far, I could also use a technique that rebases merged branches so that they form a series of D shapes instead of overlapping B shapes (this is useful during git bisect). Ideally this would happen automatically or be enforced via rules on sites like GitHub and GitLab. I always rebase my branches before merging, but others can't be bothered.
https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/merging-vs-rebasing
Where I'm going with this: I git reset and git cherry-pick constantly in my own branches before merging, so that each branch has a clean work history like the trunk. I think of this as quantum committing, because I keep exploring the problem space until I find a solution that collapses (merges) into the history.
The problem is that git GUIs are inadequate for this work. I need to be able to cut/copy/paste commits, drag and drop them for reordering, etc. It should also derive the commit diff needed to make a commit match a branch (or folder) rather than throwing a conflict in my face, so that it operates more like Apple's Time Machine. If I had this app, I could simply select all commits that I wanted to delete, it would ask me "this rewrites history, are you sure?", and then delete them and do the right thing for affected branches. It would also have infinite undo powered by git reflog.
The idea being that commit hashes should not take priority - it's all about the information. We should never be trapped by the state of the repo, because that creates anxiety.
So we're missing a tool to orchestrate git the way that Kubernetes orchestrates Docker.
(They stopped tracking these changes a few years ago, probably because the pace of changes to Apache OpenOffice slowed down to a trickle, and there's no longer much to be gained by cherry-picking these few changes.)
Overall it felt elegant, and needed no maintenance after setting it up, but honestly it was never used. I think the need to look back in time was rarer than expected, and git notes being hidden by default didn’t help for awareness.
This was useful when migrating a piece of functionality into its own repo and you want to preserve history. Adding these forced version tags into commits would be quite messy in the new repo where you switch to a new versioning scheme.
Making git notes more usable would make it easier to migrate from GitHub. It would make you less locked in.
But I have this in my IRC logs:
That way when I need to cherry-pick that commit, or do something similar (bump again), I can search for the hash of the commit I'm looking at to find what might be missing.
UI is worse than git-notes but no need for additional setup to sync them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43971620
And less recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20318947
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13732598
I have an issue tracker file that can be added to a project. While it's technically plain text, the interface for the file ensures that a format is used, and the format ensures that changes reflect only a single ticket.
Just as long as no one edits the file using a different program, it will work just fine.
Don't think anyone uses it, though.
https://github.com/lelanthran/rotsit
It's even got chat!
https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/chat.md
> Here is a plea for all forges: make code review metadata available offline, inside git.
I think this will fall on deaf ears as far as commercial forges like GitHub go, since as you yourself observe:
> But much of the value of git repos ends up locked into forges, like GitHub.
For-profit enterprises are not generally excited about commoditising their own value-add. This is not a jab at GitHub -- I think GitHub do everything right (offer a great service, a very generous free tier, and make it possible to extract all your data via API if you want to shift providers). It's just the nature of any commercial operation.
Appending information to the commit itself creates a new commit and all the commits that are based on the commit will also have to change consequently.