Subject: Re: Attributes for commits

From: Paul Franz <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 09 Jun 2007 22:10:53 -0400

But the question is how many allow you to easily query this info. That 
is one of the things I like about ClearCase's use of attributes is the 
ability to query the repository about where it is set. For example, in 
the case of git an attribute called "Status" on the commit could help 
communicate to others what the status of a commit or better yet an 
attribute on a branch. The one thing that I have realized is that change 
management is all about communication and the repositories are just one 
more way of communicating especially if the proper information can be 
extracted and maintained by the repository. A good example of this is 
CVS and merges. It is not  CVS does merging poorly. It is that:

    1) It has no mechanism in place for itself to know that the merge 
has been taken place between different branches.
    2) There is no way for people to know that the changes from one 
branch has been merged to another.

The second is where meta data helps. In the case of ClearCase, they 
something called a hyper-link that tells that a change to a file has 
been merged from one branch to another and ClearCase uses this to know 
how to merge future changes.

Now, I am not trying to turn git into ClearCase. I just see attributes 
as a great way to help communicate things, from status of a branch to 
what bug this change is related. Of course, part of adding attributes 
would be adding a way to query git to find the commits or branches that 
have the associated attributes.

Paul Franz

Robin Rosenberg wrote:
> lördag 09 juni 2007 skrev Paul Franz:
>   
>>     I am a ClearCase administrator and one of the things that I love 
>> about it is the ability to assign attributes to versions of files. Is 
>> there anybody thinking of adding the ability to assign attributes to a 
>> commit? I ask because I was thinking about how I would move from 
>> ClearCase to git and part of our process is to assign the BugNum 
>> attribute to every checkin so that we can see what bugs have been fixed. 
>> We also track the files checked in the bug tracking software to. Thus 
>> giving us a two way linkage between repository and the bug tracking 
>> system. This is VERY useful. And I was wondering if there are any 
>> thought to this for commits.
>>
>> Now, I will be honest it is possible that this has already been done (I 
>> have not read all the documentation yet) and I am justing wasting 
>> bandwidth. In which, please excuse my ignorance and tell me to just RTFM.
>>
>> Paul Franz
>>
>>     
>
> We use the convention of putting the bug number as the first work on the first line of
> the checkin, e.g. "3399 Add attributes for commits". The advantage over other methods
> is that it is always there, without the need to further investigations of assigned attributes.
>
> This convention has nothing to do with Git though. It works with any type of repo.
>
> -- robin
>
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