Git equivalent of subversion’s $URL$ keyword expansion

by

As mentioned in “Does git have anything like svn propset svn:keywords or pre-/post-commit hooks?”, Git does not support keyword expansion.

“Dealing with SVN keyword expansion with git-sv” provides a solution based on git config filter (which is not exactly what you want) and/or gitattributes.

The closest example if file information expansion I have found it still based on the smudge/clean approach, with this git Hash filter, but the clean part removes it from the file, and no path can be found.

This thread actually spells it out (as well as mentioning some git-fu commands which might contain what you are looking for, I have not tested them):

Anyway, smudge/clean does not give the immediate solution to the problem because of smaller technical shortcomings:

  • smudge filter is not passed a name of file being checked out, so it is not possible to exactly find the commit identifier.
    However, this is alleviated by the fact that ‘smudge’ is only being run for the changed files, so the last commit is the needed one.

  • smudge filter is not passed a commit identifier. This is a bit more serious, as this information is nowhere to get from otherwise.
    I tried to use ‘HEAD’ value, but apparently it is not yet updated at the moment ‘smudge’ is being run, so the files end up with the date of the “previous” commit rather than the commit being checked out.
    “Previous” means the commit that was checked out before. The problem gets worse if different branch is checkout out, as the files get the timestamp of a previous branch.

AFAIR, lack of information in smudge filter was intentional, to discourage this particular use of smudge/clean mechanism. However, I think this can be reconsidered given the Peter’s use case: “checkout-only” workspace for immediate publishing to webserver.
Alternatively, anyone interested in this use case could implement additional smudge arguments as a site-local patch.

And then, there are small annoyances, which seems to be inevitable: if you change ‘clean’ filter and check out earlier revision, it will be reported as having modifications (due to changed ‘clean’ definition).

More Related Contents:

  1. Can’t install distlearn through a firewall
  2. Why do I need to do `–set-upstream` all the time?
  3. How to read the output from git diff?
  4. How to use git bisect?
  5. Setting git parent pointer to a different parent
  6. How do I tell Git to ignore everything except a subdirectory?
  7. How to get the changes on a branch in Git
  8. Git branching: master vs. origin/master vs. remotes/origin/master
  9. Is there a way to make git pull automatically update submodules?
  10. Creating SSH keys for Gerrit and Hudson
  11. Partly cherry-picking a commit with Git
  12. How does git commit –amend work, exactly?
  13. Detach many subdirectories into a new, separate Git repository
  14. How to combine two branches from two different repositories in a single repository?
  15. How to shallow clone a specific commit with depth 1?
  16. Git push results in fatal: protocol error: bad line length character: This
  17. Git Diff with Beyond Compare
  18. Change old commit message using `git rebase`
  19. How to get changes from another branch
  20. Upgrading git from the source repository in Ubuntu
  21. Remove old git commits
  22. .gitignore ignore all files then recursively allow *.foo
  23. update package.json version automatically
  24. Different default remote (tracking branch) for git pull and git push
  25. Git: Set local user.name and user.email different for each repo
  26. Git on Bitbucket: Always asked for password, even after uploading my public SSH key
  27. Why call git branch –unset-upstream to fixup?
  28. Git diff says subproject is dirty
  29. Is it possible to set a git commit to have a timestamp prior to 1970?
  30. How to make ‘git diff’ ignore comments

Leave a Comment