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

(tylercipriani.com)
577 points Delgan | 2 comments | 22 Jun 25 09:14 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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oftenwrong ◴[22 Jun 25 14:20 UTC] No.44347165[source]▶
Another little-known feature is git trailers:

https://alchemists.io/articles/git_trailers

These are key-value structures data that can be included on a commit when it is created. These are used by some systems for attaching metadata. For example, Gerrit uses this for attaching its Change-Id.

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imiric ◴[22 Jun 25 16:49 UTC] No.44348331[source]▶
Interesting, I wasn't familiar with this feature.

I'm a big fan of conventional commits, and trailers seem like a better way of adding such metadata.

Is adding them manually to the commit message functionally equivalent to using the `--trailer` flag?

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1. chuckadams ◴[22 Jun 25 22:54 UTC] No.44350967[source]▶
I like the idea of conventional commits, but the lack of many useful categories is a real `chore:` to where I end up making my own, which tooling of course doesn’t recognize. The codification of something called conventional commits strikes me as kind of counterintuitive anyway.
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2. imiric ◴[23 Jun 25 08:18 UTC] No.44353547[source]▶
Well, they're just commonly used commit types. I don't follow the "spec" strictly and have my own conventions as well. I don't use any tooling that reads them, and I'd probably write my own if needed.

I mainly find them helpful for sticking to atomic commits. If a change doesn't align with the commit type, or it touches too many parts of the codebase, that means it should be in a separate commit.