I want to associate custom metadata with a git commit. Specifically to record a review ID from a code review but it could be anything. Tags seem a natural way to do that but I expect to have a review for every commit and I don't want to clutter gitk with tons of tags. Is there some other mechanism to add custom metadata? Can I make certain tags invisible? If I could tell gitk not to display tags matching some pattern or RE, that would likely work but I don't see a way to do that.
Awesome! Except I don't see that in git version 1.6.0.6. When was it added?
Chris Nelson
2010-04-21 17:45:04
@Chris Nelson: The patch was first sent to the mailinglist in July 2007 (sometime during the 1.5.3 timeframe). It was commited December 2008 (1.6.2). However, it didn't make it into a release until January 2010 (1.6.6). BTW: 1.6.0.6 is almost 1.5 years old and if I remember correctly, there have been a couple of security holes fixed since then.
Jörg W Mittag
2010-04-21 20:39:45
As Jörg says, it's a recent addition - and development is still relatively active. Seems likely more notes-related features will be added as time goes on.
Jefromi
2010-04-21 21:55:58
@Jefromi: Yep. Just tacking some freeform text annotations onto commits should be relatively safe, though. I don't expect major changes to *existing* notes features, only the addition of new ones. The Git community is very much commited to backwards compatibility. Also, the current codebase *has* been cooking for three years now, so the features that are currently in there, have had extensive review and testing.
Jörg W Mittag
2010-04-21 22:00:33
@Jörg: Right, I did say features added, not features changed. Git is indeed very very good about backwards compatibility (and testing). I didn't mean to imply any sort of instability - just that it's a cool feature getting cooler (especially in case the OP found some individual subfeatures lacking). For example, automatic copying of notes on rebases wasn't added until 1.7.1, I think.
Jefromi
2010-04-21 22:21:39
From what we've been able to figure out, git-notes was added at 1.6.6 and our newer systems here have 1.7.0 on them. My remaining question would be how an older core would handle notes. If I have 1.6.0 on my server and 1.7.0 on my workstation and I push a commit, what's going to happen? (That's rhetorical; I'm going to try it and we'll likely upgrade across the board anyway.)
Chris Nelson
2010-04-22 18:43:40
I don't seem to be able copy notes from repo to repo. I have 1.7.0 on my sysetm, I created a new local repository, created a file, commited some changes, added some notes, and created a local clone (git-clone file:///...). The cloned repo doesn't have any notes. There's no mention of "notes" on the git-clone man page or "clone" on the git-notes man page. I'm stumped.
Chris Nelson
2010-04-27 15:55:43