ATM (git annex 10.20231227-1~ndall+1) git annex assistant just commits with a generic non-descript (besides location) commit message e.g.

git-annex in reprostim@reproiner:/data/reprostim

and to figure out what actually git-annex has done takes at least rerunning git log --stat but in git gui of some kind takes looking at each and every commit to identify the one of interest (which e.g. modified config.yaml) or specific filtering etc.

I would have appreciated if commits became more descriptive. Since git-annex assistant is quite reactive and (at least in our case) mostly commits one file change at a time I would have appreciated commit messages like

Edited config.yaml

or Addded or Removed. If file is under a folder and length of the path is over some limit, would have abbreviated path to smth like .../config.yaml.

In case of multiple files per "action", summarized in numbers and possibly again with a hint on location

Edited config.yaml, added 10 files under Videos/

Moreover, I would have still appreciated that information annex reports about location now, but I would have made it into the extended part of the commit message after a new line, and added a version info. So altogether could have looked like

Edited config.yaml, added 10 files under Videos/

---
# git annex metadata
repository: reprostim@reproiner:/data/reprostim
version: 10.20231227-1~ndall+1

And even more "ideally", if it could pick up (if exists) an optional file (e.g. .git/ANNEX_COMMIT_META.yaml) or some git config field to add to the commit, I could have then added information about the system/software I care about, e.g.

reprostim-version: 0.20240202.0

and thus have commit carrying metadata about the version which produces those video files. ATM the video capture is completely ignorant of git-annex so I cannot go and metadata annotate those files... but that would be a different issue ... ;)

As some kind of testament to possibility and usability of such commits, could navigate through commits of our automated datalad dandisets e.g. 000108 where now without any extra tools etc I can tell where we added or removed files or just modified some metadata. It is indeed custom and more specific to our use case, but I think aforementioned would already be better.

#!/bin/sh
#
# A hook to provide custom commit messages for
# changes in the repo which would be better than default ones git-annex provides.

COMMIT_MSG_FILE=$1
COMMIT_SOURCE=$2
SHA1=$3

if [ -n "$COMMIT_MSG_FILE" ]; then
    orig_msg=$(cat "$COMMIT_MSG_FILE")
else
    orig_msg=NONE
fi

cat <<EOF >| "$COMMIT_MSG_FILE"
Custom commit msg for source=$COMMIT_SOURCE sha1=$SHA1

orig_msg: $orig_msg
git-annex version: `git annex version --raw`
environment:
`export`

EOF