Git Notes: Git's coolest, most unloved feature (2022)
tylercipriani.com
Git Notes: Git's coolest, most unloved feature (2022)
1–10 of 147 posts
Re: Git Notes: Git's coolest, most unloved feature (2022)
#2I've been using git for probably 10 years and I didn't know git notes existed. Cool!
> Here is a plea for all forges: make code review metadata available offline, inside git.
I think this will fall on deaf ears as far as commercial forges like GitHub go, since as you yourself observe:
> But much of the value of git repos ends up locked into forges, like GitHub.
For-profit enterprises are not generally excited about commoditising their own value-add. This is not a jab at GitHub -- I think GitHub do everything right (offer a great service, a very generous free tier, and make it possible to extract all your data via API if you want to shift providers). It's just the nature of any commercial operation.
Re: Git Notes: Git's coolest, most unloved feature (2022)
#3I bet it already exists, but what about an issue tracker in plain text maintained by git itself?
Re: Git Notes: Git's coolest, most unloved feature (2022)
#4I bet it already exists, but what about an issue tracker in plain text maintained by git itself?
See this recent discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43971620
And less recently:
Re: Git Notes: Git's coolest, most unloved feature (2022)
#5Git notes are only cool if you frequently add text to a commit after the commit has happened and visible to others.
The Acked-By and mailing list discussion link examples don't seem to be good examples. Both of these are likely already known when the commit is made. And git commit message basically can have an unlimited length, so you could very well copy all the discussions about the commit that happened on a forge into the commit message itself.
One use case I think might be a better example is to add a git note to a commit that has later been reverted.
Re: Git Notes: Git's coolest, most unloved feature (2022)
#6I've been using git for probably 10 years and I didn't know git notes existed. Cool! > Here is a plea for all forges: make code review metadata available offline, inside git. I think this will fall on deaf ears as far as commercial forges like GitHub go, since as you yourself observe: > But much of the value of git repos ends up locked into forges, like GitHub. For-profit enterprises are not generally excited about c…
You have to start a new service that offers that feature as one of its differentiators, then the competitors might add it (back) to catch up.
Re: Git Notes: Git's coolest, most unloved feature (2022)
#7What happens of you rebase a branch containing commits with notes attached?
Re: Git Notes: Git's coolest, most unloved feature (2022)
#8i use git notes pretty heavily in my current role. started as an experiment to keep track of internal code reviews without flooding the commit message or making PRs for everything. i tag every commit with context what tickets it maps to, infra constraints, links to incident threads if it's a fix. all lives in the repo. this avoids the need to grep slack or jira just to know why a line changed. nce you start using it at scale, you realise how little you need the platform UI at all. we keep talking about reproducibility in builds, but never in intent. maybe this is where that starts
Re: Git Notes: Git's coolest, most unloved feature (2022)
#9This is a UI problem, not a lack-of-knowledge problem. If Github's UI surfaced notes they would instantly get much more usage.
Re: Git Notes: Git's coolest, most unloved feature (2022)
#10What happens of you rebase a branch containing commits with notes attached?
Notes are copied to from the original to the rewritten commit by default. See https://git-scm.com/docs/git-notes#Documentation/git-notes.t... for details.
But I have this in my IRC logs:
TIL git-notes rewriting doesn't work properly when doing amend within rebase. :/