Why/History

I needed this ability in my Docker client (http://harpoon.readthedocs.org) so that I could maintain the modified times of the files in the context sent to the docker daemon between builds on my build servers (doing a git clone sets the modified times of the files to the time of the clone).

Originally I was shelling out to git log for every file. This was slow! I then moved to dulwich (python implementation of git) which was faster, but still slow. Then I implemented it with pygit2 (libgit2 c bindings in python) and decided to make it a separate library.

Unfortunately it’s still not as fast as doing a git whatchanged --pretty=%at and interpreting the results, but I rather a solution that uses libraries rather than interpreting text from the output of a program and the speed is not a problem for reasonably sized repositories.

In September 2018 I moved back to using dulwich. This is because pygit2 is a bit of a pain because of how it pins to particular versions of libgit2, which itself can be annoying to get installed such that pygit2 can find it.

Installation

Just use pip:

$ pip install gitmit

Changelog

0.5 - TBD

• Switch to dulwich over pygit2. This is because pygit2 is a pain to install. The downside is it is slower, but only by a few seconds.

Before 0.5 no changelog was maintained

Tests

Install testing deps and run the helpful script:

$ pip install -e .
$ pip install -e ".[tests]"
$ ./test.sh

Or use tox:

$ pip install tox
$ tox