Re: How to add custom metadata to Git commit object

From: Konstantin Khomoutov <kostix+git@007spb.ru>
Date: May 30, 2016, 18:24 UTC
Message-ID: <20160530212438.32d863cf1448361d286bdcb4@domain007.com>
In-Reply-To: <959E96F7-0FF3-4336-B098-58836136DB08@jetbrains.com>

On Mon, 30 May 2016 20:58:08 +0300 Kirill Likhodedov <kirill.likhodedov@jetbrains.com> wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> Is it possible to add custom metadata to Git commit object? 
> Such metadata should be ignored by Git commands, but could be used by
> a 3-party tool which knows the format and knows where to look. 
> 
> I assume that this should be possible, given that Git objects are
> actually patches, and patches can contain additional details. But can
> this be done with the help of Git commands?

[...]

> There are git-notes, which could be used for the purpose, but they
> are visible to the user via standard Git command, and could be used
> by the user for other purposes, so they are not very suitable for the
> task.

AFAIK, within your restrictions, it's not possible because there are only two ways to add meta information for a Git commit:

* Store it externally and somehow correlate it with the commit.

  This is what git-notes does.

* Encode it directly into a commit object.

  Since you can't use your own headers in commit objects,
  you have to encode this information into the commit message in some
  form parsable by a machine.   This is what, say, git-svn does to
  make it possible to correlate the commits it creates with their source
  Subversion revisions.

In both cases the information can be viewed by the user.

What I can't really understand is what is so bad about the user being able to peer at that data.