From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Joseph Wakeling Subject: Re: Effectively tracing project contributions with git Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 16:30:10 +0200 Message-ID: <4AAD01F2.5010803@webdrake.net> References: <4AAB9459.3070809@webdrake.net> <20090912185940.GA21277@coredump.intra.peff.net> <4AAC3889.6030908@webdrake.net> <20090913022843.GB26588@mit.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Sverre Rabbelier , Jeff King , git@vger.kernel.org To: Theodore Tso X-From: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Sun Sep 13 16:30:40 2009 Return-path: Envelope-to: gcvg-git-2@lo.gmane.org Received: from vger.kernel.org ([209.132.176.167]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1Mmq67-0006Tp-UF for gcvg-git-2@lo.gmane.org; Sun, 13 Sep 2009 16:30:36 +0200 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1754365AbZIMOaK (ORCPT ); Sun, 13 Sep 2009 10:30:10 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1754158AbZIMOaK (ORCPT ); Sun, 13 Sep 2009 10:30:10 -0400 Received: from up.nbi.dk ([130.225.212.6]:42479 "EHLO mail2.nbi.dk" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1754132AbZIMOaJ (ORCPT ); Sun, 13 Sep 2009 10:30:09 -0400 Received: from [192.168.0.4] (zux221-207-155.adsl.green.ch [81.221.207.155]) by mail2.nbi.dk (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0746B3C93F; Sun, 13 Sep 2009 16:30:08 +0200 (CEST) User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 (X11/20090817) In-Reply-To: <20090913022843.GB26588@mit.edu> X-Enigmail-Version: 0.95.7 Sender: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Precedence: bulk List-ID: X-Mailing-List: git@vger.kernel.org Archived-At: Theodore Tso wrote: > This will display all of the diffs on file (pathname) XXX by contributor YYY: > > git log -p --author=YYY XXX > > You might also find the diffstats useful: > > git log --stat --author=YYY XXX > > Or if you want *only* the diffstats for the file in question, you might try: > > git log --stat --pretty=format: --author=YYY XXX | grep XXX That's absolutely brilliant -- using these commands makes my task much easier. As for reasons -- there are several. For the FOSS project, here is a potential relicensing issue (guarding against future problems rather than addressing present ones) and indeed I'm going about it the way you suggest -- getting consent from as many contributors as possible. Despite that, it seems useful to have up-to-date file-by-file credits and copyright notices. Personally, there's also a degree of curiosity and wanting to learn some of the more complex and advanced possibilities of git -- and also basically wanting to see to what extent this task is possible. How fine-grained a degree of credit/blame can I extract for a given piece of code? And how far back in history? etc. Finally, there's an aspect which has nothing to do with code but could still be very interesting for some people in the git community. I've long been fascinated by DVCS as a collaborative tool and over the last year have been part of the Liquid Publications project: http://project.liquidpub.org/ ... that is trying to develop new models for scientific collaboration and publishing/sharing of results and ideas. One of my interests is to see whether DVCS can be harnessed to enable better and more open collaboration and micro-credit for scientific contributions. We've already set up a project on Launchpad to try to turn one of our project reports into a review paper via open collaboration: https://code.launchpad.net/~webdrake/liquidpub/peer-review ... and I'll shortly be setting up a GitHub branch for another, from-scratch article directly on DVCS and their potential applications (the use of different VCS is deliberate: one thing I'll be doing is testing different VCS and their different features). This is something I'd very much like to have git (and bzr, and hg) community members involved in. I was going to write to the git community about this at a later date once I'd got more stuff prepared, but since the present discussion could generate useful material for that it seems only fair to be open. The FOSS project stuff has nothing to do with that, but I certainly see it as a good experience to feed the LiquidPub research. Thanks for the useful advice and best wishes, -- Joe