As already mentioned in my last week’s post, I’ve been working on the describe atom. This week, I worked on improving it and fixing parts of the tests based on the comments that Christian made on the first version. The changes can be read on the branch “describe2”.

The tests still don’t seem to pass. After spending considerable amount of time redoing them and trying to understand what was actually going on, I asked Christian. He took a look at my branch and gave a really nice explanation as to what was really going on and how we can possibly fix it. So I think we can fix it now.

I also received comments on “t4205-describe-fix” and changed it (just some minor improvements on the way we do things). The changes can be read on the branch “t4205-describe-fix3”. I have also sent this patch to the mailing list.

The .mailmap options

A .mailmap file is a file which has the author and their respective email information. Git basically looks for this file in the top-level of the repo by default or if the config variables for the path are set, then it uses that file.

This file is very useful when the repo consists of various authors and committers and if any of them have more than one way in which their name is set or if they have multiple emails.

The .mailmap options are used in pretty when displaying author names, author emails, committer names, commiter emails and for reflog identity name and email. Since ref-filter doesn’t yet have the reflog options, the inital attempt would be so that ref-filter can use .mailmap for author names and emails and committer names and emails.

To make use of these options in through ref-filter, Christian suggested to read through the patches that Siddharth Asthana sent regarding the integration of .mailmap options in git cat-file. His work on it can be read here and here.

I’ve spent this week reading through his work on this and thinking about the possible approach that can be taken.

Hariom’s idea is still cooking in my local branch, nothing interesting to show yet but this will not be the case next week.

‘til next time,
Kousik