Re: Allow "git shortlog" to group by committer information

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Oct 11, 2016, 19:01 UTC
Message-ID: <20161011190103.fovcwsze77hkew4t@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CA+55aFzWkE43rSm-TJNKkHq4F3eOiGR0-Bo9V1=a1s=vQ0KPqQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 11:45:58AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> In some situations you may want to group the commits not by author,
> but by committer instead.
> 
> For example, when I just wanted to look up what I'm still missing from
> linux-next in the current merge window, I don't care so much about who
> wrote a patch, as what git tree it came from, which generally boils
> down to "who committed it".
> 
> So make git shortlog take a "-c" or "--committer" option to switch
> grouping to that.

I made a very similar patch as part of a larger series:

  http://public-inbox.org/git/20151229073515.GK8842@sigill.intra.peff.net/

but never followed through with it because it wasn't clear that grouping by anything besides author was actually useful to anybody.

My implementation is a little more complicated because it's also setting things up for grouping by trailers (so you can group by "signed-off-by", for example). I don't know if that's useful to your or not.

I'm fine with this less invasive version, but a few suggestions:

 - do you want to call it --group-by=committer (with --group-by=author
   as the default), which could later extend naturally to other forms of
   grouping?

 - you might want to steal the tests and documentation from my patch
   (though obviously they would need tweaked to match your interface)

-Peff