Reference to a commit inside a commit message

Hi to all, I'm trying to figure out what is the best way (and if it exists) to link a message of a commit to another commit. I start by saying I don't know Git very well so maybe this question can be very trival for someone but I've googled and searched into the Mailing List with little success.

The goal would be to be able to refer to a specific commit (or a set of it) through its Hash in order to justify some actions done in a commit, mantaining the message compact.

Obviously I don't mean to put the raw Hash, rather I would be happy to find a way to automatize the visits and the insertions of the commits inside the message.

What I mean is  what Gitweb do, naturally adapted for the use of Git through shell.

For example, thinking about it, I've imagined to add this feature to `git commit`:

    git commit --see-also <commit1> <commit2> ...

that adds a label (like "Signed-off-by") such as:

    See-also:
        1: <commit 1>
        2: <commit 2>
        ...

And, to other side, `git show` could have a feature like this:

    git show <commit> --see-also 1

that simply call `git show <commit-1>`.

So, there is a better way to obtain a behaviour like this? Has ever been discussed the possibility of implementing a similar feature? and There is a way to handle a similar behaviour through Hooks?

Thanks to all, NaN

Hi,

enzodicicco@gmail.com wrote:

[...]

Why not?

See the output of

	git log --grep='In commit '

and

	git log --grep='In v'

in git.git or linux.git for some examples of current practice.

Curious, Jonathan

Thank you very much

the reason is to avoid mistakes with the hash. An automatic approach can verify the existence of the commit.

I've just tried the commands and noticed that this can be a common practice. This increases my curiosity to know if there is a better way to handle this situation, if you know other thread where was discussed, please tell me the link.

Thanks, NaN

On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 08:35:52PM +0200, enzodicicco@gmail.com wrote:

Jonathan mentioned already that we typically just do this by hand[1], though look on the list for the "interpret-trailers" work being done by Christian. It would make it very easy to add:

  See-also: ....

lines to the bottom of your commit using a command like the above. I don't know if it would be easy to convert refnames into commit ids with it or not. You'd have to look.

-Peff

[1] I do not know about others, but I typically cut and paste from
    another terminal, and use the following alias in my config:

      [alias]
      ll = "!git --no-pager log -1 --pretty='tformat:%h (%s, %ad)' --date=short"

Jeff King wrote:

I have:

  [alias]
  short = show --quiet --format='%C(auto)%h (%s)%C(reset)'

Thanks to all. With interpret-trailers has been easy to make a simple script, also it checks if the Hash passed is a valid Object. I haven't found a simple way to mantain the blank line above the output of interpet-trailers (not even through cleanup). Follows the script, maybe could be usefull for somebody:

#!/bin/sh
for i in $*
do
    git show $i &> /dev/null
    if [ $? = 0 ]
    then
        trailers+=" see-also=$i"
    fi
done

msg=$(cat /dev/null | ../git-interpret-trailers $trailers)

git commit -m "$msg" -e

Yes interpret-trailers add the blank line, but when call `git commit -m "$MSG" -e` it isn't displayed. I think this happens due to the default value of 'cleanup' option of git-commit that is 'strip' (in my case) when the message is edited. I can't use neither 'verbatim' nor 'whitespace' otherwise all the comments will be displayed.

Thanks I've updated my script and now I'm using the latest interpret-trailers.

NaN