git-notes

Adds, removes, or reads notes attached to objects, without touching the objects themselves.

By default, notes are saved to and read from refs/notes/commits, but this default can be overridden. See the OPTIONS, CONFIGURATION, and ENVIRONMENT sections below. If this ref does not exist, it will be quietly created when it is first needed to store a note.

A typical use of notes is to supplement a commit message without changing the commit itself. Notes can be shown by git log along with the original commit message. To distinguish these notes from the message stored in the commit object, the notes are indented like the message, after an unindented line saying "Notes (<refname>):" (or "Notes:" for refs/notes/commits).

Notes can also be added to patches prepared with git format-patch by using the --notes option. Such notes are added as a patch commentary after a three dash separator line.

To change which notes are shown by git log, see the "notes.displayRef" discussion in the section called “CONFIGURATION”.

See the "notes.rewrite.<command>" configuration for a way to carry notes across commands that rewrite commits.

list

add

copy

<from-object> SP <to-object> [ SP <rest> ] LF

append

edit

show

merge

remove

prune

get-ref

Commit notes are blobs containing extra information about an object (usually information to supplement a commit’s message). These blobs are taken from notes refs. A notes ref is usually a branch which contains "files" whose paths are the object names for the objects they describe, with some directory separators included for performance reasons [1].

Every notes change creates a new commit at the specified notes ref. You can therefore inspect the history of the notes by invoking, e.g., git log -p notes/commits. Currently the commit message only records which operation triggered the update, and the commit authorship is determined according to the usual rules (see git-commit(1)). These details may change in the future.

It is also permitted for a notes ref to point directly to a tree object, in which case the history of the notes can be read with git log -p -g <refname>.

The default notes merge strategy is "manual", which checks out conflicting notes in a special work tree for resolving notes conflicts (.git/NOTES_MERGE_WORKTREE), and instructs the user to resolve the conflicts in that work tree. When done, the user can either finalize the merge with git notes merge --commit, or abort the merge with git notes merge --abort.

Users may select an automated merge strategy from among the following using either -s/--strategy option or configuring notes.mergeStrategy accordingly:

"ours" automatically resolves conflicting notes in favor of the local version (i.e. the current notes ref).

"theirs" automatically resolves notes conflicts in favor of the remote version (i.e. the given notes ref being merged into the current notes ref).

"union" automatically resolves notes conflicts by concatenating the local and remote versions.

"cat_sort_uniq" is similar to "union", but in addition to concatenating the local and remote versions, this strategy also sorts the resulting lines, and removes duplicate lines from the result. This is equivalent to applying the "cat | sort | uniq" shell pipeline to the local and remote versions. This strategy is useful if the notes follow a line-based format where one wants to avoid duplicated lines in the merge result. Note that if either the local or remote version contain duplicate lines prior to the merge, these will also be removed by this notes merge strategy.

You can use notes to add annotations with information that was not available at the time a commit was written.

$ git notes add -m 'Tested-by: Johannes Sixt j6t@kdbg.org' 72a144e2
$ git show -s 72a144e
[...]


    Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano gitster@pobox.com
Notes:


    Tested-by: Johannes Sixt j6t@kdbg.org

In principle, a note is a regular Git blob, and any kind of (non-)format is accepted. You can binary-safely create notes from arbitrary files using git hash-object:

$ cc *.c
$ blob=$(git hash-object -w a.out)
$ git notes --ref=built add --allow-empty -C "$blob" HEAD

(You cannot simply use git notes --ref=built add -F a.out HEAD because that is not binary-safe.) Of course, it doesn’t make much sense to display non-text-format notes with git log, so if you use such notes, you’ll probably need to write some special-purpose tools to do something useful with them.

core.notesRef

Everything above this line in this section isn’t included from the git-config(1) documentation. The content that follows is the same as what’s found there:

notes.mergeStrategy

notes.<name>.mergeStrategy

notes.displayRef

notes.rewrite.<command>

notes.rewriteMode

notes.rewriteRef

GIT_NOTES_REF

GIT_NOTES_DISPLAY_REF

GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_MODE

GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_REF

Part of the git(1) suite

1.

Permitted pathnames have the form bf/fe/30/.../680d5a...: a sequence of directory names of two hexadecimal digits each followed by a filename with the rest of the object ID.