Question: Recommended way to log the usage of git filter-repo and related changes?

[jeswcollins]

Do you have a recommended way to log the usage of git filter-repo?

Maybe this is a feature request or idea, but I'd like to be able to see a history of the use of git filter-repo and even better some info about related operations, like moving a folder or file out of a repo to another location on a filesystem.

If there is a current solution or recommendation please let me know, I perused the issues for whether this was asked before, didn't find it, but some ideas included empty commits or git notes (git features I hadn't been aware of), or tracking in a separate markdown file.

[gdlxn-ibm]

I asked a similar question in Discussion #553 and am still interested in an answer.

[newren]

Hadn't ever occurred to me, and I don't see how I'd use it.

How frequently are you rewriting history?? I figured it was a one-shot once in a blue moon kind of operation. Any given repository uses it like once or twice in its lifetime. And it takes years to get the necessary approvals to move forward with the big rewrite. At that point, the log is as small and infrequent as switching between version control systems (e.g. we started in CVS in 1997, moved to SVN in 2005, switched to Git in 2011, and did the big rewrite to remove our binary blobs in 2021). And those kinds of things tend to be mostly tracked outside the version control system, though maybe with a few notes tracked somewhere in it.

I'm really curious for the purpose of the request. You may have totally valid reasons for it, I just don't know why it's wanted so it's hard to advise on how to do it.