Re: New Proposal (simple) for Metadata in Git Commits: git-meta

From: Johan Herland <johan@herland.net>
Date: Dec 17, 2009, 00:26 UTC
Message-ID: <200912170126.40566.johan@herland.net>
In-Reply-To: <20091216163036.GE18319@spearce.org>

On Wednesday 16 December 2009, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:

Show 17 quoted lines

> Sam Elliott <sam@lenary.co.uk> wrote:
> > On 15 Dec 2009, at 23:05, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:
> >> If you dropped the --git-meta-- tags above, JGit would happily
> >> recognize the awesome: and Github: tags, but it might need a bit
> >> more work to recognize the nested user: tag.  Also, you'd be able
> >> to use git-meta on the git and Linux kernel repositories to pull
> >> out and work with Signed-off-by, Acked-by, etc.
> >
> > I'm not entirely sure about this approach. The current implementation
> > also works with PGP-signed tags, where the information is not
> > necessarily going to be at the bottom of the message when i use `git-
> > cat-file -p`. I think it shouldn't be too hard to also have git-meta
> > read any YAML-like data just before the signing message.
> 
> Ah, good point.  But as you point out, it should be simple enough
> to detect a PGP signature on the bottom and just clip that off the
> end, and then perform the YAML-like data parsing on the footer.

I agree with Shawn's point that it should be possible to do this without embedding it in custom ---tags---.

I would even try to parse the _entire_ commit message, and then discard everything that didn't match the "<word>: <free-form value>" format (with possible continuation lines). Even though this will generate some false positives (probably non-sensical "key: value" pairs), I don't see this as a major problem , since most users of this functionality are looking for a small set of specific keywords (which are even more unlikely to turn up as false positives)

In future versions of Git, you might also want to check for YAML-like data in the notes object corresponding to the commit in question (see git-notes in v1.6.6 for more details on the new notes feature). This would allow users to add/edit such metadata after the commit was made, without having to rewrite the commit itself.

Have fun! :)

...Johan

-- 
Johan Herland, <johan@herland.net>
www.herland.net