Comment by kccqzy
8 months ago
Git 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.
The common failure mode is commit messages proudly proclaiming they fixed a bug that they did not. And linking knock-on bugs created by their fixes to one bug.
Maybe I’m weird that way. I’ve had too many coworkers who don’t really even look at annotations to remind themselves why this code was written in the first place. They will just yolo and hope nobody ties the problems back to them. But once you’ve dealt with an irate customer who waited impatiently for a bug to be fixed, and only to have the bug be reintroduced a short time later, you may become more circumspect about bug fixes.
There’s often a refactor needed to fix multiple bugs at once. There’s often refactor can open up new feature opportunities, or performance improvements.
> 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.
Discussion regarding a commit (is: review) and acknowledgment of a commit cannot happen before the commit has been made.
> One use case I think might be a better example is to add a git note to a commit that has later been reverted.
Commit messages are better for this use case. When you got blame a file, it shows the latest changes for that file. If a commit reverts changes from another commit, the newer commit that reverts the older commit will show up in the blame.
> Discussion regarding a commit (is: review) and acknowledgment of a commit cannot happen before the commit has been made.
It can't happen before the commit on a feature branch, but it can happen before merging the commit back to the main development branch. Given that a rebase or merge commit is already frequently necessary to integrate changes from a feature branch after review is finished, I don't see why this type of info couldn't be added (or even required to exist) before merging.
The history-destroying problems of rebasing are a rant on their own.
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You’re treating a commit as an atom, which is not true in patch based git situations like Linux.
Most of the rest of us do not work this way, but they still do. The rest of us also only have to deal with three way merges most of the time, instead of octopus merges. Though I jokingly call, “fixing an incorrect three way merge” a “five way merge” because you end up doing a star shaped pattern of diffs to re-resolve the code to retain the intents of all three versions. A to merge, B to merge, merge to HEAD~, A to HEAD~ and B to HEAD~
I'm not really sure what you mean by this. Git treats commits as atomic (unchangeable), and thus they are atoms (indivisible). This is not really related to patches, unless you're referring to partially applying patch series. Can you elaborate on what you mean?
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Discussion can keep happening after the commit is created.