[Feature request] Give non-unique names to commits for grouping

[Feature request] Give non-unique names to commits for grouping

[Christos Pappas]

Dear Git users,

I suggest that we should have the option to mark each commit with a
category name, that is not necessarily unique (like 'tags') so we
could have commit groups.
For example we could:
git mark {commit_id} {name}

Then we could give special functionality to some commands based on
those "marks".
For example if we had marked a few commits with the name 'fix_typo'
git log --mark fix_typo. Show all the commits marked with 'fix_typo'
git blame --mark fix_typo Run git blame but ignore commits with 'fix_typo'


Christos

Re: [Feature request] Give non-unique names to commits for grouping

[Konstantin Tokarev]

11.03.2020, 02:16, "Christos Pappas" <chrispappas99@gmail.com>:
> Dear Git users,
>
> I suggest that we should have the option to mark each commit with a
> category name, that is not necessarily unique (like 'tags') so we
> could have commit groups.
> For example we could:
> git mark {commit_id} {name}
>
> Then we could give special functionality to some commands based on
> those "marks".
> For example if we had marked a few commits with the name 'fix_typo'
> git log --mark fix_typo. Show all the commits marked with 'fix_typo'
> git blame --mark fix_typo Run git blame but ignore commits with 'fix_typo'

Why not use git log --grep? It can give better results if someone accidentally
forgets to use mark properly, but mentions keyword in the topic.

That said, it would be great if there was an easy way to use git log --grep
with commit topics only (i.e., search only in the first line)

-- 
Regards,
Konstantin

Re: [Feature request] Give non-unique names to commits for grouping

[Martin Fick]

On Wednesday, March 11, 2020 1:16:09 AM MDT Christos Pappas wrote:
> I suggest that we should have the option to mark each commit with a
> category name, that is not necessarily unique (like 'tags') so we
> could have commit groups.
> For example we could:
> git mark {commit_id} {name}
> 
> Then we could give special functionality to some commands based on
> those "marks".
> For example if we had marked a few commits with the name 'fix_typo'
> git log --mark fix_typo. Show all the commits marked with 'fix_typo'
> git blame --mark fix_typo Run git blame but ignore commits with 'fix_typo'

Perhaps git notes could be used to do something like this?

-Martin

-- 
The Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. is a member of Code 
Aurora Forum, hosted by The Linux Foundation

Re: [Feature request] Give non-unique names to commits for grouping

[Christos Pappas]

Thank you for your answers.

From what I can deduce, both of your suggestions require that the
commit messages(or notes) must have some special text for which we can
search for, which is hacky and would be different on every repository.

What I am suggesting is something like, labels on GitHub, hashtags on
Social-Media, or Tags in News sites. It's a well known concept so it
will be easy to understand and use.

We could initially create the concept of marks/labels/{another name}
('tags' is already in use by another git command) and then
incrementally enhance the git commands to use this functionality (like
the example I gave above, with git blame).


Στις Τετ, 11 Μαρ 2020 στις 6:00 μ.μ., ο/η Martin Fick
<mfick@codeaurora.org> έγραψε:
>
> On Wednesday, March 11, 2020 1:16:09 AM MDT Christos Pappas wrote:
> > I suggest that we should have the option to mark each commit with a
> > category name, that is not necessarily unique (like 'tags') so we
> > could have commit groups.
> > For example we could:
> > git mark {commit_id} {name}
> >
> > Then we could give special functionality to some commands based on
> > those "marks".
> > For example if we had marked a few commits with the name 'fix_typo'
> > git log --mark fix_typo. Show all the commits marked with 'fix_typo'
> > git blame --mark fix_typo Run git blame but ignore commits with 'fix_typo'
>
> Perhaps git notes could be used to do something like this?
>
> -Martin
>
> --
> The Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. is a member of Code
> Aurora Forum, hosted by The Linux Foundation

Re: [Feature request] Give non-unique names to commits for grouping

[Martin Fick]

On Wednesday, March 11, 2020 8:56:44 PM MDT Christos Pappas wrote:
> Thank you for your answers.

FYI: the list preference is inline instead of top-posting.
 
> From what I can deduce, both of your suggestions require that the
> commit messages(or notes) must have some special text for which we can
> search for, which is hacky and would be different on every repository.

By "different", do you mean the mechanism, or the content of the "hashtag" 
itself? I would imagine that you would expect the hashtags to be different,
and that you are concerned that they might be stored differently on each
site, maybe on one site as a note like

 hashtag: awesome

and on another:

 label: awesome

Is that correct?

If so, then it seems like a reasonable suggestion that some tooling be built 
to potentially enforce something like that using git notes and/or commit 
messages?

> What I am suggesting is something like, labels on GitHub, hashtags on
> Social-Media, or Tags in News sites. It's a well known concept so it
> will be easy to understand and use.
> 
> We could initially create the concept of marks/labels/{another name}
> ('tags' is already in use by another git command) and then
> incrementally enhance the git commands to use this functionality (like
> the example I gave above, with git blame).

Right, maybe git notes is just the storage mechanism for such a feature?

-Martin

-- 
The Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. is a member of Code 
Aurora Forum, hosted by The Linux Foundation

Re: [Feature request] Give non-unique names to commits for grouping

[Junio C Hamano]

Christos Pappas <chrispappas99@gmail.com> writes:

> Thank you for your answers.
>
> From what I can deduce, both of your suggestions require that the
> commit messages(or notes) must have some special text for which we can
> search for, which is hacky and would be different on every repository.
>
> What I am suggesting is something like, labels on GitHub, hashtags on
> Social-Media, or Tags in News sites. It's a well known concept so it
> will be easy to understand and use.

By "hashtags", do you mean #hashtags, i.e. you must add some special
text for which you can search for?  That does sound just as hacky as
any other embedded text in the messages of commit objects.

One large downside of embedding text (or #hashtags) in the message
of a commit object is that you need to plan ahead and know what
group the commit belongs to before you make it, but in general, it
is unreasonable to expect perfect foresight.  Often you do not know
what group the commit belongs to (e.g. you may want to label the set
of commits that broke the latest release for feature 'frotz' with
hashtag "#broke-frotz", but most likely you didn't know you were
breaking the feature when you were creating these commits).  Adding
these offending commit objects some comments in the form of notes
objects can be done retroactively, and as long as the set of
"tag-worthy" commits is minority among all commits, grepping for
"#hashtag" in the notes to find the notes that contain the tags you
wanted should be cheaper than "git log --grep" which must read all
the commits in the history.

Another way may be "git notes --ref broke-frotz add X -m . X" (and
similarly for Y and Z that also belong to "#broke-frotz" set of
commits) to mark them with an almost empty note in refs/notes/broke-frotz
hierarchy.  Then "git notes --ref broke-frotz list" should be able
to list these commits that have any notes in refs/notes/broke-frotz
and there is no need for grepping.  Of course you can make it richer
by describing why each of X, Y, and Z are in the "broke-frotz" set
when you give the notes text to them.

Re: [Feature request] Give non-unique names to commits for grouping

[Christos Pappas]

> By "different", do you mean the mechanism, or the content of the "hashtag"
> itself? I would imagine that you would expect the hashtags to be different,
> and that you are concerned that they might be stored differently on each
> site, maybe on one site as a note like
>
>  hashtag: awesome
>
> and on another:
>
>  label: awesome
>
> Is that correct?
>
> If so, then it seems like a reasonable suggestion that some tooling be built
> to potentially enforce something like that using git notes and/or commit
> messages?

Yes, I think that every project would end up having a different convention.

> Right, maybe git notes is just the storage mechanism for such a feature?

Maybe some code could be shared behind the scenes(I don't know the
code architecture), but the interface should be different.

I would expect a commit log to look like this:

commit {commit_hash} (HEAD -> master, tag: maybe_a_tag_here, labels:
bug_fix front_end, origin/master, origin/HEAD)
Author: ...
Date: ...

Commit Message

This also requires at least one command to create a label (git label
create {name}), and a different command to assign one of the available
labels (git label assign {label} {commit}), to avoid mistakes (The
levenshtein algorithm could also be used when the user makes a typo
and tries to assign a label that doesn't exist)

Στις Τετ, 11 Μαρ 2020 στις 9:31 μ.μ., ο/η Martin Fick
<mfick@codeaurora.org> έγραψε:
>
> On Wednesday, March 11, 2020 8:56:44 PM MDT Christos Pappas wrote:
> > Thank you for your answers.
>
> FYI: the list preference is inline instead of top-posting.
>
> > From what I can deduce, both of your suggestions require that the
> > commit messages(or notes) must have some special text for which we can
> > search for, which is hacky and would be different on every repository.
>
> By "different", do you mean the mechanism, or the content of the "hashtag"
> itself? I would imagine that you would expect the hashtags to be different,
> and that you are concerned that they might be stored differently on each
> site, maybe on one site as a note like
>
>  hashtag: awesome
>
> and on another:
>
>  label: awesome
>
> Is that correct?
>
> If so, then it seems like a reasonable suggestion that some tooling be built
> to potentially enforce something like that using git notes and/or commit
> messages?
>
> > What I am suggesting is something like, labels on GitHub, hashtags on
> > Social-Media, or Tags in News sites. It's a well known concept so it
> > will be easy to understand and use.
> >
> > We could initially create the concept of marks/labels/{another name}
> > ('tags' is already in use by another git command) and then
> > incrementally enhance the git commands to use this functionality (like
> > the example I gave above, with git blame).
>
> Right, maybe git notes is just the storage mechanism for such a feature?
>
> -Martin
>
> --
> The Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. is a member of Code
> Aurora Forum, hosted by The Linux Foundation