Re: [PATCH] commit: Add -f, --fixes <commit> option to add Fixes: line

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 12:29:32PM +0100, Johan Herland wrote:

> > A hook-based solution could do this.  But a built-in "all-purpose"
> > handler like "footer.Fixes.arg=commit", which was intended to be
> > reusable, wouldn't be able to do such footer-specific extra work without
> > having to create new special cases in git each time.
> 
> Which begs the question (posed to all, not specifically to you): Why
> would we want solve this issue in config instead of in hooks? The
> hooks will always be more flexible and less dependent on making
> changes in git.git. (...a suitably flexible hook could even use the
> config options discussed above as input...) In both cases, we need the
> user to actively enable the functionality (either installing hooks, or
> setting up config), and in both cases we could bundle Git with
> defaults that solve the common cases, so that is not a useful
> differentiator between the two approaches. I would even venture to
> ask: If we end up solving this problem in config and not in hooks,
> then why do we bother having hooks in the first place?

One thing that is much nicer with config vs hooks is that you can manage
config for all of your repositories by tweaking ~/.gitconfig (and that
is where I would expect this type of config to go).

Managing hooks globally means having each repo symlink to a central hook
area, and having the forethought to set up the symlink farm and use
init.templatedir before cloning any repos.  We could probably make this
friendlier by reading from ~/.githooks and defining some semantics for
multiple hooks. E.g., fall back to ~/.githooks if the repo hook is not
executable, or possibly run them both (or even allow multiple instances
of a hook in ~/.githooks, which can help organization), and consider the
hook a failure if any of them fail.

-Peff