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Git Notes: Git's coolest, most unloved­ feature (2022)

(tylercipriani.com)
577 points Delgan | 1 comments | 22 Jun 25 09:14 UTC | HN request time: 0.43s | source
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kccqzy ◴[22 Jun 25 13:46 UTC] No.44346929[source]▶
Git notes are only cool if you frequently add text to a commit after the commit has happened and visible to others.

The Acked-By and mailing list discussion link examples don't seem to be good examples. Both of these are likely already known when the commit is made. And git commit message basically can have an unlimited length, so you could very well copy all the discussions about the commit that happened on a forge into the commit message itself.

One use case I think might be a better example is to add a git note to a commit that has later been reverted.

replies(3): >>44347388 #>>44347657 #>>44349238 #
1. hinkley ◴[22 Jun 25 18:39 UTC] No.44349238[source]▶
The common failure mode is commit messages proudly proclaiming they fixed a bug that they did not. And linking knock-on bugs created by their fixes to one bug.

Maybe I’m weird that way. I’ve had too many coworkers who don’t really even look at annotations to remind themselves why this code was written in the first place. They will just yolo and hope nobody ties the problems back to them. But once you’ve dealt with an irate customer who waited impatiently for a bug to be fixed, and only to have the bug be reintroduced a short time later, you may become more circumspect about bug fixes.

There’s often a refactor needed to fix multiple bugs at once. There’s often refactor can open up new feature opportunities, or performance improvements.