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Store Code Discussions in Git using Git Notes

https://wouterj.nl/2024/08/git-notes

Code discussions contain relevant information. Isn’t it a shame that we keep these in the centralized GitHub/GitLab servers, far away from our decentralized Git code? As soon as we move provider, we’ll lose all old discussions! And how do you ever find the pull requests back from 5 years ago? Symfony has implemented a lightweight solution to this problem years ago using a less-known feature of Git: Git Notes.

Store Code Discussions in Git using Git Notes

2 comments

RonSijm

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Interesting idea to store github comments inside git, the article just isn't very clear to me on how to actually do it.

He's talking about using an "internal CLI tool" so I guess it's not a public tool?

But anyways, this kinda sounds like something you could do though a Github Action right? Like if a PR is merged, run an action that also appends PR comments or other meta-data from github into git

starshipwinepineapple

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The first part of the article talks about how to use git notes and has an example commit, followed by adding the note, and then viewing the note. This is all native git.

The "problem" is that we have centralized discussions in github/gitlab comments and if we want to retain that data then we need to convert the comments into gitnotes. The CLI part is that specific discussion on how Symfony uses git notes to store github comments. It references an internal CLI but then goes through an example of how to use github api to fetch the comments, create git notes, then push those git notes to github. So while the symfony CLI is internal, it looks like we're given an example of how to do this for github.