WARNING: THIS IS AN EXPERIMENT. IT CHANGES STUFF THAT PROBABLY SHOULDN'T BE CHANGED IN WAYS THAT PROBABLY SHOULDN'T BE DONE.
USE ON YOUR OWN RISK. IT MAY CORRUPT YOUR REPOSITORY AND/OR YOUR COMMITS. REALLY.
This is a utility to track information about which branch the author was working on when creating each commit. This can make it easier to figure out the context of a particular commit without tracing it to the nearest merge/branch point.
The script "add-hdr-to-head.rb" can be used as a post-commit hook that will modify the head commit object to contain information about the current branch. The result is saved as a new commit object and the branch head is changed to point to the new object.
Currently, it doesn't work well with rebased commits (the branch information gets lost in the rebase process).
Information about the working branch can be retrieved from a particular commit object by issuing the following command:
git cat-file -p 1cb7f76b5 | grep ^x-working-branch
A version of gitk able to show this information is available here: https://github.com/pajp/git/tree/x-working-branch/gitk-git
You can see how it looks here:
As you can see, it's easy to see the commits created in the "redshirt" branch without tracing upwards to the merge commit even though the branch has been deleted.
In a typical git workflow, you can see the relationship of all commits, but context information, such as in which branch a particular commit was introduced, is sometimes hard to find. You may have to trace back (or forward) to the nearest branch or merge to see if a commit came from a branch called "experimental" or "maintenance". Adding this metadata to the commit object preserves this information without cluttering the commit log message.