{link: http://github.com/willb/gliss Gliss} is a tool for extracting specially-formatted tagged comments from git histories.  It is designed to provide a sane workflow around extracting version history, ticket, and backwards-incompatibility information from a stream of commits.

This page is intended to get you started with gliss as quickly as possible; you may want to see {link: http://chapeau.freevariable.com/2011/01/grepping-for-git-glosses-with-gliss.html this short article} for more details.

{section:  Annotating your commits}

A _gliss gloss_ is a simple tagged annotation in a commit message.  The basic format of a gliss gloss is three identical characters on a line by themselves, followed by a tag name, followed by the same three identical characters that opened the line, and then the tag text; for example:

  ===FOO=== This is a gloss tagged FOO

If you need to extend comment text beyond one line, simply indent the second line and ensure that every subsequent line is at least as indented as the second line.  Here's what that would look like:

  ===FOO=== Here's a slightly longer-winded
    gloss tagged FOO.

Such a gloss will end before the beginning of the first line that is not at least as indented as the second line.

{section:  Useful tags}

Here are some useful tags for your gliss glosses:

1:  =GT=, followed by a ticket number (starting with a pound so gittrac will recognize it), which indicates that this commit is related to a particular ticket.
1:  =GT:Fixed=, followed by a ticket number (again, starting with a pound); this implies =GT= and indicates that this commit resolves a particular ticket.
1:  =UpgradeNote= includes a description of a backwards-compatibility issue introduced by this commit (e.g. "This commit changes the wire protocol for the pony server.")
1:  =VersionHistory= includes a version history entry related to this commit.

{section:  Installing a commit message template}

{section:  Installing gliss}

The easiest way to install gliss is to use the {link: http://rubygems.org/gems/gliss RubyGem} package.

{section:  Inspecting glosses}