snix/users/wpcarro/website/blog/posts/git-rev-refs.md

Credit

Credit goes to tazjin@ for this idea :)

Background

Using git revisions to pin versions is nice, but git SHAs aren't very human-friendly:

• They're difficult to type.
• They're difficult to say in conversation.
• They're difficult to compare. e.g. Which is newer? 2911fcd or db6ac90?

Solution

Let's assign monotonically increasing natural numbers to each of our repo's mainline commits and create git refs so we can use references like r/123 instead of 2911fcd.

• They're easy to type: r/123
• They're easy to say in conversion: "Check-out rev one-twenty-three."
• They're easy to compare: r/123 is an earlier version than r/147.

Backfilling

Let's start-off by assigning "revision numbers" as refs for each of the mainline commits:

for commit in $(git rev-list --first-parent HEAD); do
  git update-ref "refs/r/$(git rev-list --count --first-parent $commit)" $commit
done

We can verify with:

λ git log --first-parent --oneline

If everything looks good, we can publish the refs to the remote:

λ git push origin 'refs/r/*:refs/r/*'

Staying Current

In order to make sure that any newly merged commits have an associated revision number as a ref, add something like the following to your CI system to run on the builds of your repo's mainline branch:

λ git push origin "HEAD:refs/r/$(git rev-list --count --first-parent HEAD)"

Summary

To verify that the remote now has the expected refs, we can use:

λ git ls-remote origin | less # grep for refs/r

If that looks good, you should now be able to manually fetch the refs with:

λ git fetch origin 'refs/r/*:refs/r/*'

Or you can use git config to automate this:

λ git config --add remote.origin.fetch '+refs/r/*:refs/r/*'
λ git fetch origin

Now you can run fun commands like:

λ git show r/1234
λ git diff r/123{4,8} # see changes from 1234 -> 1238

Thanks for reading!