A followup to "Extremely Linear Git History"

Hey, this is a follow-up to Extremely Linear Git History.

The origin idea of the previous post was obviously a bit of a joke, taking inspiration from bitcoin mining, and version control systems of the past (aaah, a simpler time).

The post exploded (over 40 000 page views tracked in Google Analytics, so probably way more than that in reality, given the audience), it was #1 on Hacker News for many hours, was circulating on Twitter, Reddit, etc etc. Obvioiusly the HN discussion derailed (most of it is off-topic)

I thought I knew what this post was going to be about. I was, happily, wrong.

I thought it was going to be a post about rebasing in git, since its called "Extremely Linear Git History" and it sort of is, but in a way more fun way.
— @adamgordonbell

A neat trick with this tool is to generate a commit message that corresponds to a given issue number. It could almost be useful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33706665

> This is very silly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33704521

> This is absolutely genius. Would be nice to upstream it and make it fast. I would start using it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33705410

> Proof of work git hashes. This is nuts and I love it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33713804

> “shit show” 😂 https://www.reddit.com/r/programminghorror/comments/z3fwdx/comment/ixlj8br/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Even Elon reached out an called me a "hardcore hacker".

After the post blew up. I started working on actually improving the project, from the shitty 50-lines of bash script that I previously had.

It's still in bash, and it's still glorious.

New features include:

Faster GPU-powered SHA-1 prefix generation, powered by lucky_commit
A "shit" ("short git") CLI wrapper for git, that works with the incremental prefixes ("shit show 14" -> "shit show 00000140")
Easy setup post-commit hook
Customizeable formats
Customizeable epoch - make the latest commit your 00000000 commit, so that you can get started without rewriting the full project history
Built in branch filtering, for example, to only run on your main branch ("git linearize --install-hook --if-branch main")
Cleaned up the output,
I even added tests!

After doing this, and building git-linearize on top of git-linearize, I kind of started to like it, more than in a "haha, omg this is such a hack" kind of way. I actually like this process.

Just look at this! Just by looking at the output I knew that I hadn't pushed in 3 commits. Genious.

$ git push
Enumerating objects: 16, done.
Counting objects: 100% (16/16), done.
Delta compression using up to 10 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (10/10), done.
Writing objects: 100% (11/11), 2.89 KiB | 2.89 MiB/s, done.
Total 11 (delta 6), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (6/6), completed with 3 local objects.
To github.com:zegl/extremely-linear.git
   0000040..0000043      main -> main

git fetch origin pull/${ PR_NUMBER}/head && \
    git merge --ff-only FETCH_HEAD && \
    git linearize