how to determine version of binary

Scenario:  I detect a binary file that is 'dirty'.  I don't know how it 
got there.  However, I know it came from a git repo.  So I calculate the 
sha1 of the binary.  What is the git command to determine which commit 
that binary version first appeared in?  And the last commit that binary 
appeared in?

Why:  we have people ftp'ing binaries around.  I want to see the commit 
message and source change of that commit to see what the binary version is.

v/r, neal

On Sat, May 05, 2012 at 02:12:44AM -0500, Neal Kreitzinger wrote:

There is no pre-made git commit. I would look at the output of "git log --raw --no-abbrev" in a pager and search for the sha1 in question. That will show you the commits that made it come and go. Note that there may be multiple instances in which the sha1 comes and goes (e.g., two parallel lines of development which both introduce or modify a sha1, or even linear development with reverting).

You can script it like this:

  git log --format=%H --no-abbrev --raw |
  perl -lne '
    BEGIN { $sha1 = shift }
    if (/^[0-9a-f]{40}$/) {
      $commit = $_;
    }
    elsif (/^:\d+ \d+ ([0-9a-f]{40}) ([0-9a-f]{40}) \S+\t(.*)/) {
      if ($2 eq $sha1) {
        # sha1 on "after" side; content probably came into existence
        if ($1 eq $sha1) {
          # unless it was that way before, in which case it was a mode change
          # or rename. Ignore.
        }
        else {
          print "$commit: $sha1 appears (as $3)";
        }
      }
      elsif ($1 eq $sha1) {
        # sha1 on "before" side; content went away
        print "$commit: $sha1 went away (from $3)";
      }
    }
  ' $sha1_of_interest

though I wouldn't bother to do so unless I was going to do some analysis over many files.

This won't necessarily show you the version they have; it will only show you the version that introduced that particular version of a file. A more general question is "given a set of files, which revision did they come from?". For that, you would want to find the set of commits that contain sha1 A, then intersect them with the set of commits that contain sha1 B, and so forth. You can do that by scripting around "rev-list" and "ls-tree", but it's a little more complicated.

-Peff

On 5/5/2012 4:24 AM, Jeff King wrote:

What about this recipe:

calculate sha1 of dirty deliverable (binary, html, etc)

grep git tree objects for that sha1

somehow determine which of the tree sha1's is newest. Not sure how to do that.

grep commit objects for that tree sha1

now you have the last commit containing that file so now you know the version of that file.

-neal

On Sat, May 05, 2012 at 11:18:13AM -0500, Neal Kreitzinger wrote:

Your "not sure" step would be to walk the revision graph and look for the tree in question. So really you would just walk and grep the trees. If you know the filename (which you do in your instance), then it's not even that expensive:

  git rev-list HEAD |
  while read commit; do
    if test "`git rev-parse $commit:path/to/file`" = $sha1; then
      echo "found it in $commit"
      break
    fi
  done

But note that that does not tell you the revision of the whole project. It tells you one _possible_ version, because it is one that contains that file. If you remove the "break" there you can get the full set of commits. And then you cross-reference that with the set of commits in another file. And then another, and so on, until you eventually have narrowed it down to a single commit.

It's kind of slow, mostly because we have to invoke rev-parse over and over. But I don't think there is a way to print the sha1 of some path for each revision via the regular revision walker.

You could probably do better by finding trees that contain a particular sha1, then finding trees that contain that tree, and so forth, until you have a set of commits that contain those trees. And then you could do that backwards walk for all of the files in parallel (i.e., only accept a tree if it matches all of the deliverables you have).

-Peff

On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 12:42 PM, Neal Kreitzinger <nkreitzinger@gmail.com> wrote:

make sure you are using 'git hash-object' to compute the sha, not the system supplied 'sha1sum' or eqvt.

Unless it is a frequent need, I would just use git log's --raw option to search for the first 7 digits of the SHA you found above.

For example, a very quick one (which does not count odd situations like the same file appearing multiple times or on other branches, for instance) is:

    git log --raw | less +/$SHA

You'll want a line where the SHA appears as the second SHA, not the first one (in case a later commit changed the file it would also appear as the first sha). Example, I'm looking for "14136eb", so I type in

    git log --raw '--format=%n%ncommit: %h subject: %s' | egrep commit\|14136eb | grep -B 1 14136eb

The output I get back is:

    commit: 1cf062f subject: ACCESS_CHECK split into ACCESS_1 and ACCESS_2; docs updated
    :100755 100755 14136eb... 2a57e2d... M	src/gitolite-shell
    --
    commit: b391000 subject: POST_GIT triggers get 4 more arguments
    :100755 100755 20f4e5d... 14136eb... M	src/gitolite-shell

So the commit that introduced this version of this file is b391000 (1cf062f is a later one where this file got changed to something else).