Subject: Re: Git log of all (modifying) commands run on a repo?

From: Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2007 23:59:07 +0100

Bill Lear wrote:
> On Wednesday, February 7, 2007 at 23:29:56 (+0100) Jakub Narebski writes:
>>...
>> Is history of shell commands too short? Reflogs doesn't help
>> (concatenate all reflogs, perhaps preceding them with file name,
>> and sort by date) either?
> 
> Well, I thought of shell history also, but the problem is, that we often
> have multiple repos on a machine (we may be executing a long-running
> experiment in one, for example, and not want to disturb it).
> 
> Shell history in that case doesn't help.  Also, not having the branch
> information is a minus (each of us puts the current git branch in our
> prompt).

Fact. Although in worst case, if shell history is deep enough, you could
do forensic on it... unless you use multiple shells, freely interspersing
commands in them...
 
> I didn't know about reflogs.  What did you have in mind?  Could you
> show an example, please?

Unfortunately till some time ago reflogs were not enabled by default.
If they are enabled, for each branch you should have 
$GIT_DIR/logs/refs/heads/<branch> file, which contains information about
operations on given branch. It has pre- and post-operation commit ids,
and timestamp of a change, together with short description. You could
concatenate reflogs, and sort them by timestamp.

Reflogs are purely local matter, they represent local view of history.

See git-update-ref(1), "Logging Updates" section, git-repo-config(1)
(or git-config(1)), description of core.logAllRefUpdates variable,
and Git User's Manual.

Examples (sha1 are shortened, and lines are broken for easier reading):

 * .git/logs/refs/heads/origin
 798123... e68989... Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]> 1170836783 +0100 \
    pull origin git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git: fast-forward
 e68989... 6506e1... Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]> 1170873620 +0100 \
   fetch origin git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git: fast-forward

 * git/logs/refs/heads/master
 93342d... 39daf6... Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]> 1169555797 +0100 \
   commit: t/t1300-repo-config.sh: value continued on next line
 39daf6... b62502... Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]> 1169809125 +0100 \
   commit (merge): Merge branch 'master' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git
 b62502... 7ab704... Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]> 1170150241 +0100 \
   pull origin: Merge made by recursive.
 7ab704... bb77c5... Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]> 1170238531 +0100 \
   pull origin: In-index merge

 * git/logs/refs/heads/gitweb/web
 ceae8a... a29878... Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]> 1169973601 +0100 \
   commit: Git config file reader in Perl (WIP 5)
 a29878... 1b600e... Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]> 1170034498 +0100 \
   reset --hard 1b600e659abc7e409c9d830e332d3cef010
 62c1c1... 05b936... Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]> 1170034499 +0100 \
   rebase: Git config file reader in Perl (WIP 1)
-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland