Automatically Populate Co-Authored-By lines

[dmcquay]

Because each of the WIP commits is generated by the authors in the group, it is trivial to aggregate the WIP commits and generate a unique list of Co-Author lines. I have written a little wrapper script in bash that does this when I call the done command.

CURRENT_BRANCH=`git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD`
FROM_BRANCH=master
if [[ "$CURRENT_BRANCH" != "mob-session" ]]
then
  FROM_BRANCH=`echo "$CURRENT_BRANCH" | awk -F/ '{print $2}'`
fi

CO_AUTHOR_LINES=$(git log $FROM_BRANCH.. --pretty=format:"Co-Authored-By: %an <%ae>" | sort | uniq | grep -v `git config user.email`)

mob done

printf "\nRecommended Co-Author Lines have been copied to your clipboard:\n\n"
printf "$CO_AUTHOR_LINES"
printf "\n\n\n$CO_AUTHOR_LINES" | pbcopy

I think it would be cool to integrate this into mob done command. I am possibly willing to submit a PR but wanted to get a sense of the maintainers' opinion on this before I put in the effort.

Some things to consider:

• My implementation is not very robust at computing branch names. It is sufficient for my needs. If integrated into the mob done command, then of course this would be improved.
• Right now all I am doing is copying it to the user's clipboard. I'm assuming OSX and therefore using pbcopy. If integrated into mob done, I would need a cross-platform solution for this.
• Ideally, I would love to auto-populate this into a template so it just automatically shows up in the user's editor when they do their next commit. I haven't figured out a way to do this though. Maybe copying to the clipboard is the best we can do, but I'm curious if any git masters out there know a way to make this more seamless.

[MarioKusek]

@dmcquay This is exactly what I was looking for in the tool.

Regarding auto-populate one way to go is to setup commit template ([https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Configuration] commit.template).

I have done it this way:

1. setup template git config commit.template .mob-authors - this can be done once on each mobber machine
2. put .mob-authors file in .gitignore - this can be done once
3. create file .mob-coauthors with the content of CO_AUTHOR_LINES and put this file in the current directory of repo
4. when you create commit editor will pick up this file

The drawbacks are:

• that you can not use your specific template and if you use commit -m then authors are ignored
• if we want to use a specific template with this approach then we need hooks and variable expansion

[dmcquay]

Thanks, Mario! I'll experiment with that in the coming days.

[dmcquay]

Since this is a squash commit, git generates .git/SQUASH_MSG file. When this file is present, the commit template is ignored. So I have to delete that file as part of my script as well.

[dmcquay]

Here's something working just to try out the flow (in bash again).

REPO_ROOT=`git rev-parse --show-toplevel`
CURRENT_BRANCH=`git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD`
FROM_BRANCH=master
if [[ "$CURRENT_BRANCH" != "mob-session" ]]
then
  FROM_BRANCH=`echo "$CURRENT_BRANCH" | awk -F/ '{print $2}'`
fi

CO_AUTHOR_LINES=$(git log $FROM_BRANCH.. --pretty=format:"Co-Authored-By: %an <%ae>" | sort | uniq | grep -v `git config user.email`)

mob done
rm $REPO_ROOT/.git/SQUASH_MSG

printf "message\n\n\n$CO_AUTHOR_LINES" > ~/.gitmob-commit-template

if [[ `git config --global commit.template` != "~/.gitmob-commit-template" ]]
then
        echo "A commit template has been generated with suggested Co-Authors. Use it with this command:"
        echo "git config --global commit.template '~/.gitmob-commit-template'"
fi

Lots of ways we could do this. Perhaps we check if they already have a commit template and append these lines to it?

One downside of this is that the template would remain after the commit and would be stale for non-git-mob future commits. Perhaps we should create a timer background process that removes this template (or removes lines added to an existing template) after some period of time?

I'm going to try this for the next few days or so and see how it feels.

[simonharrer]

Hi, great ideas. I like the idea of automatically appending the co-authors to the .git/SQUASH_MSG via the mob tool. That way, this is non-invasive and users can decide whether to use this or not.

[dmcquay]

Oh geez. That's much better than deleting the SQUASH_MSG and making the user configure a commit template. I will try it that way.

[simonharrer]

Another idea: one could comment the commit messages "mob next [ci-skip]" in the SQUASH_MSG template as well, as no one really wants those messages in the commit in the base branch.

[simonharrer]

Hi @dmcquay any way I can help you with your proposed idea?

[dmcquay]

Absolutely. I have been using my bash implementation of this but I haven’t started on a go implementation at all yet. Feel free to work on it if you want.

On Sat, Nov 14, 2020 at 12:55 PM Simon Harrer notifications@github.com wrote:

Hi @dmcquay https://github.com/dmcquay any way I can help you with your proposed idea?

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/remotemobprogramming/mob/issues/81#issuecomment-727257377, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAA4Q4OYJIQQR5LY5HOMTH3SP3OBJANCNFSM4SDKW5KA .

[stevegt]

Are there any objections to adding the Co-authored-by: lines as standard behavior? (I think it's the right thing to do.)

Here's what I get when I meld @dmcquay's version with the SQUASH_MSG idea -- not extensively tested yet, but seems to work. We'll use this ourselves here for the next week or so, and if nobody else gets to it first we'll translate to Go and add it to done().

#!/bin/bash -ex

REPO_ROOT=`git rev-parse --show-toplevel`
cd $REPO_ROOT
CURRENT_BRANCH=`git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD`
FROM_BRANCH=master
if [[ "$CURRENT_BRANCH" != "mob-session" ]]
then
  FROM_BRANCH=`echo "$CURRENT_BRANCH" | awk -F/ '{print $2}'`
fi

CO_AUTHOR_LINES=$(git log $FROM_BRANCH.. --pretty=format:"Co-authored-by: %an <%ae>" | grep -v $(git config --get user.email) | sort -u)

mob done

printf "\n\n$CO_AUTHOR_LINES" >> .git/SQUASH_MSG

[stevegt]

I started thinking about how to test this thing, and realized ./create-testbed needs to be refactored to create more local repos and set user.name and user.email on all of them. I've just now done that, added a test case, and pushed to https://github.com/t7a/mob/tree/append-coauthors. I'll watch for pull requests against that branch in case anyone else wants to hack on this. This will eventually come up in our local mob session queue here; we'll add or finish the implementation and send a pull request to @simonharrer (I'll start a draft PR now). I plan to include a coauthor header for @dmcquay regardless, unless Dustin has any objections.

[dmcquay]

Awesome! I’m so glad you’re keeping this moving. I’ll take a look at this in the next day or so.

On Sun, Jan 31, 2021 at 6:58 PM stevegt notifications@github.com wrote:

I started thinking about how to test this thing, and realized ./create-testbed needs to be refactored to create more local repos and set user.name and user.email on all of them. I've just now done that, added a test case, and pushed to https://github.com/t7a/mob/tree/append-coauthors. I'll watch for pull requests against that branch in case anyone else wants to hack on this. This will eventually come up in our local mob session queue here; we'll add or finish the implementation and send a pull request to @simonharrer https://github.com/simonharrer. I plan to include a coauthor header for @dmcquay https://github.com/dmcquay regardless, unless Dustin has any objections.

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/remotemobprogramming/mob/issues/81#issuecomment-770512754, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAA4Q4NUBTRZFZYLIZQWEJTS4YDCVANCNFSM4SDKW5KA .

[lamalex]

144 closes this. it both reads any authors from the squash_msg, as well as appending co-authored-by to WIP commits and making sure those individuals get attribution in the final commit. --with is optional, but enables you to make sure everyone gets attribution.

[stevegt]

We've split the automatic append code off from #144, putting it in #121 to more narrowly close just this bug for the 1.4.0 release, leaving the --with code for later. @dmcquay if you get a chance to exercise the #121 code, that would be great; tests pass and I've pushed as of a few minutes ago, but have no idea yet if it actually works in a real mob. ;-)