Re: [PATCH] gitlog-to-changelog: provide a ChangeLog-repair mechanism

[Jim Meyering]

Eric Blake wrote:
> On 11/01/2011 11:15 AM, Jim Meyering wrote:
>> I've been thinking about this for years, ever since the unpleasantness
>> of that first git commit that I mistakenly attributed to myself.
>>
>> With this new --amend=FILE option, you'll be able to maintain
>> a list of<SHA,CODE+>  pairs where SHA is a 40-byte SHA1
>> (alone on a line) referring to a commit in the current project, and
>> CODE refers to one or more consecutive lines of Perl code.
>> Pairs must be separated by one or more blank lines.
>> Using that file, invoke gitlog-to-changelog with this new option,
>> and it'll do the rest.
>
> Is there some way to use 'git notes' as a way of generating these
> fixups as notes attached to the various commits they are meant to fix,
> in a known namespace, and to thus generate FILE by doing a git notes
> listing of all commits with an attached note?

At least for now, I'd prefer not to rely on git notes, since we
haven't established a policy for ensuring how to propagate them
to the shared repository and how to handle merges.

> That would make using this a bit better than having to hand-maintain a

IMHO, it would make the process more fragile, at least for now.

> touchup file.  But even without 'git notes', having this option to fix
> history makes sense, and I'm glad to see it made available.
...
> Can this also be used in conjunction with Gary's proposed patches to
> add secondary authorship information, so that the changelog entry can
> be touched up to list multiple authors?  That is, these touchups
> should be applied prior to the point of parsing for well-known markers
> used to alter changelog metadata.

These modifications happen *very* early in the parsing process, while
the multi-line log data is still in a single buffer/variable, so yes.