Re: Recording the current branch on each commit?

From: David Lang <david@lang.hm>
Date: Apr 29, 2014, 21:58 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.02.1404291456080.14881@nftneq.ynat.uz>
In-Reply-To: <87fvkx6c4z.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org>

On Mon, 28 Apr 2014, David Kastrup wrote:

Show 26 quoted lines

> Jeremy Morton <admin@game-point.net> writes:
>
>> On 28/04/2014 10:02, David Kastrup wrote:
>>> Jeremy Morton<admin@game-point.net>  writes:
>>>
>>>> On 28/04/2014 09:32, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>>>>>>> some people to is to always merge with --no-ff, that way you see the branch
>>>>>>> name in the merge commit.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> But surely, it's recommended with Git that you try to avoid doing
>>>>>> --no-ff merges to avoid commit noise?
>>>>>
>>>>> Nope. Different people have different needs, there's no recommendation. If
>>>>> anything, the recommendation is to do a ff merge, because that's the default.
>>>>
>>>> That's what I'm saying.  With an ff merge, you don't get the merge
>>>> commit message telling you the branch name.
>>>
>>> And I don't _want_ that branch name to be recorded.  The whole point of
>>> a distributed version control system is that it's nobody else's business
>>> how I organize my work before submitting it.
>>
>> Well it would be optional, so obviously you wouldn't be forced to
>> share the branch name.  It's not like we're trying to "pry in" to your
>> private development.  It's a way of choosing to share what you may
>> consider to be useful contextual information about the commit.

It sounds like what you want is really a template for a commit message that lets you include arbitrary information in that template, including things like branch name that may not make sense for other people.

If there is no commit message, populate the template and show that to the user in their editor.

If there is a commit message, don't touch it.

Then people can use whatever they want (including environment variables) as part of their messages.

David Lang