Question

We have a custom-made system to track client tasks/projects. We manually add a checklist and mark them off, often also adding the time it took for each point. This is very useful but a bit redundant, as we also provide the same information in git. So I’m thinking of somehow adding an extra parameter to git that allows me to indicate how long something took, and then extract this data and save it in a database (we normally use PHP/MySQL). How would one go about this?

I think of doing:

git commit -m "Adding search functionality" 15

And then somehow being able to extract the 15 (minutes) to process it later on, together with the description of this task, so that we do not have to add “Adding search functionality” which took 15 minutes separately. I’m thinking of a hook that takes this second parameter and uses it as a variable to be passed on to a PHP script. Is this feasible?

Answer 1

You can integrate your custom arguments into the commit message itself and then parse this later

git commit -m "foo [15min]"

or maybe

git commit -m "bar [00:00:15]"

Now its quite easy to find [] and parse the values within.

Github, redmine, bitbucket (and so on) does something similar, when they link commits to issues and vice versa

git commit -m "Fixed bug [Closes #42]"

You should think about using a real bug/issue tracker instead of “a checklist” anyway.