From: Johan Herland Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:26:40 GMT Subject: Re: New Proposal (simple) for Metadata in Git Commits: git-meta Message-ID: <200912170126.40566.johan@herland.net> In-Reply-To: <20091216163036.GE18319@spearce.org> On Wednesday 16 December 2009, Shawn O. Pearce wrote: > Sam Elliott 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 ": " 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, www.herland.net