Welcome to the 114th edition of Git Rev News, a digest of all things Git. For our goals, the archives, the way we work, and how to contribute or to subscribe, see the Git Rev News page on git.github.io.
This edition covers what happened during the months of July and August 2024.
[PATCH] ReviewingGuidelines: encourage positive reviews more
Junio Hamano, the Git maintainer, sent a patch to the mailing list which updated the ‘ReviewingGuidelines.txt’ documentation with the goal of encouraging positive reviews even more.
The ‘ReviewingGuidelines.txt’ documentation was created a few years ago by Victoria Dye to provide “consistent definitions for common review terminology” and to give advice to reviewers, in a similar way as the MyFirstContribution documentation gives advice to contributors.
The few paragraphs that Junio’s patch added said that positive reviews are highly encouraged, even when the author is a work colleague. They show that people other than the author(s) of the reviewed patches care about the issue that is addressed.
When writing positive reviews, reviewers should tell why they support the patches, and should show that they understand the issue and how the patches address it. They are also encouraged to describe how they understand complex parts of the patches.
Junio’s patch also adds a small paragraph saying that “uplifting feedback goes a long way towards encouraging contributors to participate more actively in the Git community.”
Eric Sunshine then replied to Junio pointing out a minor typo in his patch. Patrick Steinhardt replied to Junio too. He said that he had already guided some of his GitLab colleagues who review patches and suggested them to do what Junio describes.
Derrick Stolee, who prefers to be called Stolee, replied to Patrick agreeing with him and saying that it also helps to not have internal reviews for experienced contributors. He said that they used to have internal reviews at Microsoft but it was overly cautious and “loses the benefits of doing reviews in the open”.
Patrick replied to Stolee saying that GitLab also used to have an internal review, but it recently became optional and recommended only for people who are not yet familiar with the mailing list workflow.
Junio then sent a version 2 of the patch fixing small typos. Patrick reviewed this version and found it good, so it was later merged into the ‘master’ branch.
Various
Light reading
--patch in Git
by Tekin Süleyman on his blog. It describes selectively stashing changes,
selectively discarding changes, and selectively restoring changes.
This article expands on the
“interactively stage changes with --patch” advice
in Git Tips you (Possibly) Didn’t Know You Needed.git log -L
(and the diff=python gitattribute) to diagnose a real-life bug that was ostensibly
caused by an upgrade to Authlib.
git log -L article,
mentioned in Git Rev News Edition #105.github-comments notes reference).git branch --edit-description and git notes fall short; this led to
the creation of the git-branchnotes tool.git diff:
there are also minimal, patience and histogram diff algorithms available
(via the --diff-algorithm option);
this is not stated in the article.Git tools and sites
gh GitHub CLI, glab GitLab CLI,
tea Gitea CLI, etc.), and works across multiple POSIX and non-POSIX shells.
Details about the Git completion support can be found in issue #99.
Written in Go under the MIT license.git-branchnotes is a command-line tool (that can be run as a git external command) that allows you to add notes to a branch and manage them. Written in Ruby.
grep,
that performs semantic searches on text input using word embeddings (word2vec).
It’s designed to find semantically similar matches to the query,
going beyond simple string matching. Supports multiple languages.
Written in Go under the MIT license.This edition of Git Rev News was curated by Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>, Jakub Narębski <jnareb@gmail.com>, Markus Jansen <mja@jansen-preisler.de> and Kaartic Sivaraam <kaartic.sivaraam@gmail.com> with help from Štěpán Němec, Brandon Pugh, Ralf Steube and Toon Claes.