Re: Referring to commits in commit messages

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Dec 19, 2018, 18:39 UTC
Message-ID: <20181219183927.GA228469@google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20181219182216.GA17309@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Hi,

Jeff King wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

>   - web interfaces like GitHub won't linkify this type of reference
>     (whereas they will for something that looks like a hex object id)
>
>   - my terminal makes it easy to select hex strings, but doesn't
>     understand this git-describe output :)
>
> These tools _could_ be taught a regex like /v(\d+.)(-rc\d+)?([~^]+d)*/.
> But matching hex strings is a lot simpler, and works across many
> projects.

Is there some rule about how long the hex string has to be for this to work?

[...]

>   In commit 1234abcd (the subject line, 2016-01-01, v2.11.0), we did
>   blah blah blah

The issue with this is that it is ambiguous about what the tag name is referring to: does that mean that "git describe" and "git version" tell me that v2.11.0 is the nearest *previous* release to that commit or that "git name-rev" tells me that v2.11.0 is a nearby *subsequent* release that contains it?

Of course the latter is the only answer that's useful, but in practice the former is what people tend to do when they are trying to follow a convention like this. So we'd need some automatic linting to make it useful.

I think a more promising approach is the Fixes trailer Duy mentioned, which has been working well for the Linux kernel project. I'll follow up in a reply to his message.

Thanks, Jonathan