Git repository mail notifications

[Geert Janssens]

On Tuesday 28 May 2013 12:22:42 Derek Atkins wrote:
> Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be> writes:
> > 2. I created a tag "svn_last" to mark the last commit in history that
> > is still in sync with our now read-only svn repository. An unexpected
> > side effect of this is that each subsequent notification message now
> > starts with this tag in the subject line. Before, the subject started
> > with the last commit's hashref.  I do actually prefer the tag
> > usage. It gives an idea of what base the commit is starting from.  On
> > the other hand "svn_last" is not really descriptive for the current
> > state of the website. So I probably should add two more tags (on on
> > the master branch and one on the beta branch).  I'm just wondering
> > what would make sensible tags for the website ? We don't really do
> > "releases" there. So a v2.4.x doesn't really make sense. What would ?
> > "stable" ? "prod" ?  "main" ? ...
> 
> Neither.  I would prefer that the "last tag" not be included at all.  I
> see no reason to include it in the email, because IMHO it doesn't
> provide any real useful information.  As a point of information, the
> MythTV project have subject lines that look like:
> 
>   mythtv branch devel/logging updated by danielk. v0.27-pre2-1194-gce1462b
>   packaging branch master updated by nigel. v0.26-33-ge758033
>   mythtv branch master updated by paulh. v0.27-pre2-1124-ge48d898
> 
> The first symbol is the repo (in our case gnucash, gnucash-htdocs, etc).
> Then "branch" and the branch-name.  Then the operation (updated) and the
> user (by ...).  And then it looks like there's a tag+commit-version.
> I'm not 100% sure how that's created by them.  The decimal-looking
> number is definitely an incremental, because I saw some commits with
> sequentials.  So it looks like it's "tag"-"some sequence"-g"git-shorthash"
> 
> -derek

>From what I can see the mythtv guys are using the same mail script :)

Except that they use the subject line unaltered, where I made some changes to it based on 
faulty assumptions. The last part of their subject line is the untruncated version of our 
current "svn_last". It's the output of the command "git describe", which tries to, well, 
describe a git commit as well as possible, or in the words of the git help describe command:

"The command finds the most recent tag that is reachable from a commit. If the tag points to 
the commit, then only the tag is shown. Otherwise, it suffixes the tag name with the number 
of additional commits on top of the tagged object and the abbreviated object name of the 
most recent commit."

I understand this better now. I'll reorder the subject line again and stop truncating the output 
of git describe. IMO that info actually does make sense.

Geert