Re: the pager

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Sep 3, 2013, 08:16 UTC
Message-ID: <20130903081652.GG3608@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <201308291541.r7TFfuJr023110@freeze.ariadne.com>

On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 11:41:56AM -0400, Dale R. Worley wrote:

> I know I'm griping here, but I thought that part of the reward for
> contributing to an open-source project was as a showcase of one's
> work.  Commenting your code is what you learn first in programming.

You will find that the best comments in the git source code are those written in the commit messages. Learn to use "git blame" (or I recommend "tig blame" for interactive use), "git log -S", and the new "git log -L" for finding the commits that touched an area.

It is also sometimes useful to look at the review and discussion that accompanied the original patches on the list, if you are looking for rationale or alternatives that did not make it into the commit message. You can simply search on gmane, but Thomas Rast also maintains a mapping of commits back to their original discussions. You can fetch his notes by doing:

  git config remote.mailnotes.url git://github.com/trast/git.git
  git config remote.mailnotes.fetch refs/heads/notes/*:refs/notes/*
  git fetch mailnotes

You can then use "git notes --ref=gmane show" to show notes for specific commits, or just "git log --notes=gmane" to view them along with the regular logs.

-Peff