This is a bad idea. I can come up with a TODO at any time; I especially do when I’m in the middle of something and have staged local changes. In that case, this:
git commit --allow-empty -m "TODO: $*"
Will do the wrong thing—committing my staged changes even if I didn’t want that, and giving them a wrong commit message. If the change is small, I might not notice. If I were going to involve Git in my task tracking, I would much prefer something like this:
todo() {
touch TODO
printf "%s\n%s\n\n" "$(date)" "$*" | cat - TODO > TODO.tmp
mv TODO.tmp TODO
$(git config core.editor) TODO
}
Before reading the article, I thought it was going to be about keeping a TODO file in your revision control so that you can see when things are added/removed by reviewing the history.
That is one advantage of on-branch distributed bug tracking. One advantage you also get, which is more important on large projects, is knowing which bugs have had their fixes merged into the branch you are working on. This is a bit unwieldy with just text TODO files since you have to keep finished TODOs around and then merge them, usually manually solving conflicts, as changes move between branches. For this purpose I use a dedicated distributed bug tracker https://github.com/travisb-ca/nitpick after I had evaluated pretty much all the alternatives.
For a very small team a simple text file can work, but for teams of more than a handful some tool support is necessary.
Ditto. I have a todo.md in almost all of my git repositories. Once I finish a feature, I delete the line from the todo file and throw it in the same commit.
Too bad. As I understand it that's because rebase relies on the patch format as the full representation of a commit; but that excludes the commit's notes. replacement refs and grafts survive it in squashed form because they are part of the graph traversal.
But I've checked nearly everything thing out. Online kanban boards, Trello, Asana, Org-Mode you name it...
Its extremely hard to beat the flexibility of a diary and pencil/pen. You can doodle, scratch, draw, record, take notes, maintain time, review history, write a lesson, work out problems... The list is endless... You can do all this in a easy extremely distraction less tool. And to be frank maintaining a diary gives me a great deal of discipline in fighting procrastination. Diaries also are great progress indicators.
Most successful people I know maintain diaries. Diaries and Pens are here to stay.
clever code: keeping an empty todo commit in the repo tree.
clear code: keeping a textual todo or org mode file committed in the repo.
While this is another fun and a clever trick that can be done with git and it delights the geek within me, I wouldn't do this while collaborating on production code with a team.
I could use all sorts of git tricks that could do the same thing, but sometimes it's nice to just keep an easy, version controlled text file I can knock things off of.
That said, I frequently sprinkle in '//TODO: ...' or '//XXX:' in source code comments when I'm in the middle of hacking. It's pretty easy to aggregate those back into my main todo list when I'm done.