Re: Git notes list/show <revision-range>

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 09:17:51AM +0200, Michael J Gruber wrote:

> But since the OP is volunteering to code for notes :-)
> We could need a feature which allows to log the history of a note. The alias
> 
> `git noteslog' is aliased to `!sh -c 'git log $(git notes get-ref) "$@"' -'
> 
> gives you the history of the notes tree (try it with "-p"),

Hmm, I just use "git log notes/<whatever>", which works fine. It does
help if you know that the default ref is "notes/commits", though.

It's not something I do often, though (most of my notes use has been
things that automatically make notes, so the history tends to be
uninteresting and useful only for debugging the note-making code).

> sometimes I would like the history of the notes to a specific commit, and in
> 
> git noteslog -p -- $(commit)
> 
> I would have to use for $(commit) all possible breakdowns of the sha1 of
> the commit for all possible notes tree structures. It feels as of the
> revision walker needs to learn another pathspec, say
> 
> ":(note):<sha1>"
> 
> in line with our magic pathspec discussion.

That's a clever solution. It is a little non-intuitive for a user to
need to know about notes storage, though. Maybe you were already
thinking this, but we could have something like:

  git notes log [revs] [--] [pathspec]

where "[revs]" are checked for in refs/notes/*, defaulting to
"refs/notes/commits". And each element of the pathspec gets the
":(note):" magic automatically. I wonder if we could even resolve the
pathspec bits as regular refs.

So you could write:

  # long form, just as you can do with "git log"
  git notes log notes/commits -- ":(note):`git rev-parse HEAD`"

  # or with automagic ref lookup for pathspec
  git notes log notes/commits -- HEAD

  # and automagic default ref
  git notes log -- HEAD

  # and I think you should be able to write a disambiguator similar to
  # what we use for the revs/paths distinction, but this time for
  # notes-refs versus regular refs. And then drop the "--":
  git notes log HEAD

I think it would need a little refactoring of setup_revisions() to be
more flexible, but most of the hard work is already done by the usual
revision traversal mechanism.

-Peff