Re: Tracking branch history

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: May 12, 2006, 23:45 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0605121640210.3866@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0605121838490.6713@iabervon.org>

On Fri, 12 May 2006, Daniel Barkalow wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

>
> One feature that might make git more intuitive to people is if we were to 
> additionally track the history of what commit was the head of each branch 
> over time. This is only vaguely related to the history of the content, but 
> it's well-defined and sometimes significant.
> 
> E.g., if you know that two weeks ago, what you had worked, but it doesn't 
> work now, you can use git-bisect to figure out what happened, but first 
> you have to figure out what commit it was that you were using two weeks 
> ago. Two weeks ago, we had that information, but we didn't keep it.

Note that this is possible, but it must be done literally as a separate history from the commit history.

IOW, a good (?) way to do it is to literally have a commit hook that basically just does

	echo $new >> .git/$branch-commit-history

possibly together with a datestamp thing (ie it could be something like "echo $new "$USER" $(date)" rather than just the commit SHA1).

Make sure that not just "git commit", but anything else that changes the branch (notably, "git fetch" and a fast-forward merge as a result of an explicit merge or a "git pull") would also do this same thing.

But realize that this is really purely a per-repository logging thing, and not really bound to the actual git history any way.

			Linus