Adding comments to groups of changes?

Benoît Allard benoit at aeteurope.nl
Thu Jun 26 09:41:40 CDT 2008



Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
> People put their created stuff into a global repository and give their stuff a 
> specific description. 
> Git requires destroying history for that, which I don't like, but I think, 
> collecting several commits together into one block which gets a description 
> would be a very nice feature. 
> 
> Then I could say 
> hg commit -m "A" 
> -> rev 1
> hg commit -m "B"
> -> rev 2
> hg commit -m "C"
> -> rev 3
> hg commit -m "undo B"
> -> rev 4
> 
> hg group -m "AC" -r 1:4
> 
> 
> And instead of many small commit messages which can't convey a bigger picture, 
> people could see all the changes I grouped with one clear description. 
> 
> This way, the history would get far more readable without having to destroy 
> history in the process, because it only adds descriptions. 
> And if it were also possible to group groups, repository history could be 
> documented in place without having to change history -> This would be like 
> attaching a tag not only to a specific revision, but to a group of revisions. 
> 
> And for the smaller scale, I as developer could say "These are some of my 
> commits. All together they fix bug 12345" and do the same for other related 
> commits. 
> 
> If working in seperate directories, I could as well do this when I push my 
> changes. 
> 
> I don't know if this is technically feasible, but it is a workflow I would 
> like very much. 
> 
> Is this already possible? 

I never heard of any feature like that in the past, but I actually also 
like the concept ...

Looks feasible to me to implement it as an extension defining the group 
command and overwriting the log command showing the groups instead of 
the changesets if any. groups could be identified by hashes based on 
their sub components. Another command to inspect the content of the 
groups might be usefull also.

Care to write a proof of concept ?

A good starting point is 
http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/WritingExtensions

Regards,
Benoit
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