RE: How to watch files in a Git repository

[<rsbecker@nexbridge.com>]

On June 8, 2022 7:55 PM, Jeff King wrote:
>On Mon, Jun 06, 2022 at 06:04:11PM +0200, R. Diez wrote:
>
>> If there is nothing of the sort, I could write my own script in Bash
>> or Perl. I can handle cron and sending e-mails, but I do not know much
>> about Git's internals. Could someone provide a few pointers about how
>> to code this? I would expect there is some command to list commits,
>> and all files touched by a particular commit. And there would be some
>> way to interface with Bash or Perl, which does not need parsing
>> complicated text output from Git.
>
>This sounds kind of like git-multimail:
>
>  https://github.com/git-multimail/git-multimail
>
>That's usually triggered from a hook, I think, but it would not be hard to trigger it
>with arbitrary segments of history.
>
>You'd probably want to keep a "seen" ref of processed commits, and move from
>that, like:
>
>  # assuming you just care about one branch on the remote, but this
>  # concept can be extended to several
>  branch=refs/remotes/origin/main
>  seen=refs/heads/seen
>
>  git fetch
>
>  # I don't know what git-multimail expects, but this is similar to what
>  # a server-side receive hook would show
>  echo "$(git rev-parse $seen) $(git rev-parse $branch) $branch" |
>  some-git-multimail-command
>
>  # now move your pointer forward for next time
>  git update-ref $seen $branch
>
>If multimail doesn't do what you want, then you can probably just script
>around:
>
>  git rev-list $seen..$branch -- $paths_you_care_about |
>  git diff-tree --stdin -r --name-only --format="Commit %h touched: " --
>$paths_you_care_about
>
>depending how you want to format things.

I am unsure this solves the question. Is the OP looking for anyone who modifies any set or subset of files in any clone or in the upstream repo? This is generally considered a "watch" function and is sometimes available on the upstream repo manager, like GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket rather than in core git, so take into account changes made anywhere. If that is the case and the watch functions are not sufficient, you might have to put the hooks on your upstream rather than in your clone.

Just my thoughts,
Randall