git replace --edit for updating commit messages (was: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?)

[Noam Postavsky]

On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 1:47 PM, Sven Axelsson <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Yes, this is a common need and Git should be changed to allow editing
>> of commit log entries even though this could be said to change the
>> state of the prior releases.
>
>
> A couple of months ago it was suggested to use `git replace --edit` for
> that.
> Did anyone try it out to see if it could be used in the Emacs workflow?

There were some questions raised, the 2 main ones were

1. How to deal with the fact git replace is powerful enough to replace
the actual content of the commit.

This is easy enough to stop with a hook, see attached pre-receive.

2. Performance implications of having many replacements.

This appears to be a more serious problem. The git replace command
creates a ref per replacement. Since we expect our number of
replacements to be some fraction of the commits, we could end up with
quite a few. To get a sense of the worst case timing I wrote a script
to replace the message of every commit in the repository with an
upcased SHOUTY version. After running it on an Emacs repo clone, my
.git/refs/replace directory was 8.5M in size. I tried git pack-refs
--all which emptied the the replace directory, and resulted in a 12M
packed-refs file.

Doing git log became dramatically slower (packing the refs did not
make much difference).

Original repository:

~/src/emacs/emacs-master$ time git log --oneline | wc -l
126614

real    0m5.435s
user    0m3.157s
sys    0m2.780s

~/src/emacs/emacs-master$ time git log --oneline | head >/dev/null

real    0m0.009s
user    0m0.003s
sys    0m0.003s


Repository with all commit messages replaced: (almost all, there were
a few messages that lacked letters, so my upcasing script had no
effect)

~/src/emacs/emacs-clone$ time git log --oneline | wc -l
126614

real    0m49.337s
user    0m8.270s
sys    0m39.680s

~/src/emacs/emacs-clone$ time git log --oneline | head >/dev/null

real    0m0.520s
user    0m0.237s
sys    0m0.250s


I attached the scripts used (upcase-commit-message.sh and
git-replace-all.sh), in case anyone wants to replicate my experiments.

pre-receive
Description: Binary data

upcase-commit-message.sh
Description: Bourne shell script

git-replace-all.sh
Description: Bourne shell script