Hey joey,
I often find myself wanting to compare older versions of files (plots, images, etc...) and currently browse the git history and copy-paste paths to the old files in the .git/annex/objects to open them or launch a diffing program. This works, but is quite tedious.
I see there is git annex diffdriver, but haven't tried it yet.
Wouldn't a view showing old versions of files be nice? I haven't thought this through fully, but I think this could be implemented similar to the /=foo or /foo=bar original path filtering logic by introducing a new virtual metadata field (maybe :? or ^ like ”anchor”/”history”? 🤔 Aren't that many ASCII characters without special shell meaning left that aren't allowed in a field name... 😅) where old versions of files get assigned that ^ field with their own path or filename and the view would just use the filename as folder level like any other field.
Or a git annex view --historical could be added that allows for scanning the entire history (or up to a certain reach into the past) to include old files as well and adds a git commit identifier to the filename to avoid conflicts.
# show all versions of files tagged with 'plot' in the foo directory
git annex view --historical tag=plot /=foo
# This would then make a folder structure like
Not only would this facilitate easy history browsing, but also a more visual way of (force) dropping old content selectively - especially with graphical tools like my Thunar plugin (switch into historical view, select and right-click unneeded files, drop).
What do you think?
Thanks again for git-annex, It's amazing! 🥳
Yann
I don't think this would necessarily be an easy or fast branch to construct.
And of course
git checkoutof a commit that contains an old version of a file is a standard way to look at the old version of a file when using git, and works with git-annex..git checkoutworks, sure, but it doesn't help if you want to have all old versions of a file in a directory for comparison. Is there git magic (something in the direction of worktree?) to do that? Or can git-annex produce a list of paths to all versions of an annexed file? Then a script could be written to make a poor-mans-view --historicalmanually. I guess one could manually parsegit log -porgit diff --name-onlysomehow, but I have a feeling that this gets ugly fast...