Re: Tracking branch history

[Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>]

Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org> wrote:
> Log ref updates to logs/refs/<ref>
> 
> If config parameter core.logAllRefUpdates is true or the log
> file already exists then append a line to ".git/logs/refs/<ref>"
> whenever git-update-ref <ref> is executed.  Each log line contains
> the following information:
> 
>   oldsha1 <SP> newsha1 <SP> committer <LF>
> 
> where committer is the current user, date, time and timezone in
> the standard GIT ident format.  If the caller is unable to append
> to the log file then git-update-ref will fail without updating <ref>.
> 
> An optional message may be included in the log line with the -m flag.

This is all well and good but its sort of useless without the diffcore
being able to lookup what SHA1 was valid on a given branch at a given
point in time.  :-)

I'm thinking about extending the 'extended SHA1' syntax to accept
a date (or date expression) as a suffix:

	HEAD@'2 hours ago'
	HEAD@'2006-04-20'
	HEAD@'2006-04-20 14:12'

etc... This would be merged into get_sha1 (sha1_name.c) so its
usable pretty much anywhere.  Does this seem reasonable?  If so
I'll work up a patch for it.

-- 
Shawn.