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Comment by afiori | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice if in the first case one could annotate those thirty commits in a narrative "here I started another attempt", "this solution could not work for X,Y and Z reasons", "these 8 commits are just typos" maybe with also the ability to only select a subset of a commit.

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I've recently added the ability to associate a wiki page in Fossil with an individual check-in or with a branch - as additional documentation about that branch or check-in. This is similar to your concept, if I understand you correct. The Fossil changes have worked well enough so far. But only time will tell if this ends up being a good idea or not, I suppose.

An example is the "About branch begin-concurrent-pnu-wal2" at the top of the page https://www.sqlite.org/src/timeline?r=begin-concurrent-pnu-w... - the page shows all check-ins for the branch, and the Wiki at the top gives a summary of what that branch is about.

Another example is the detailed discussion in the "About" section for check-in https://www.sqlite.org/src/info/718ead555b09892f - important information that records the thinking about this commit but which seems too prolix for a check-in comment.

Let me know your thoughts on this idea.

If how understand it right it is pretty much what I had in mind (assuming that you can always create new branches on old commits).

In the last week I have been quite charmed by many of Fossil ideas, I will for sure try this feature too.

Do you require this functionality and for people to write meaningful comments? I just question if version control is where any of this should happen.

Personally, how I tend to work is if there’s some link between commit and ticketing system I can refer to, it’s about the best you can expect.

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