git-cliff-core: allow adding arbitrary values to commits

[MarcoIeni]

Is there an existing issue or pull request for this?

• I have searched the existing issues and pull requests

Feature description

First of all thank you for the amazing crate and the hard work you put into it 🙏

I would like to attach a remote context to the commit, so that people can write commit.remote.username in release-plz changelog (which is similar to commit.github.username git-cliff equivalent.

Even though I can't have commit.remote I tried enabling the "github" feature and my Cargo.lock exploded because of many dependencies to retrieve remote info I'm not using (because I'm retrieving remote info by myself). So I would like to have a "lighter" way to add arbitrary fields to the commit object.

So a very similar mechanism to #613 but limited to the commit object.

Desired solution

The Commit struct could have a Map of <String, Json> (this is psudo-code). In my example, "String" is remote and Json is { author }.

Library users should be able to add any fields they like to it.

Alternatives considered

The alternative is rely entirely on git-cliff for commits remote info retrieval.

My issue is that I generate multiple changelogs that share some commits, so we would hit GitHub API multiple times for the same commits for no reason.
We could solve this by implementing #468 but I'm not sure if it's easier than this issue.

Also, with this approach, the following problems remain:

• I would like to have commit.remote instead of commit.github, commit.gitea, etc. (unless you change my mind that commit.github is a better idea 👀)
• I prefer to avoid adding all those dependencies because release-plz already takes a while to compile 😵

Additional context

PR where I experimented: MarcoIeni/release-plz#1630

Also, I'm curious, why you have commit.github, commit.gitea, etc instead of a unified solution (e.g. commit.remote)?

[MarcoIeni]

I just thought about the simplest solution to my issue: the Commit struct adds a remote field as Option. This field is not behind a feature flag (so I don't need to pull other dependencies).

Of course it's not a generic solution 👍

[orhun]

Hello Marco 👋🏼

The Commit struct could have a Map of <String, Json> (this is psudo-code). In my example, "String" is remote and Json is { author }.

Would that work? Is serde serializing keys as separate fields?

Btw can you take a look at #784 which does something similar (adds a new field called extra). Maybe we can tweak PR a bit to satisfy this use case too.

Also, I'm curious, why you have commit.github, commit.gitea, etc instead of a unified solution (e.g. commit.remote)?

There is a stale PR #688 which greatly simplifies that module.

[MarcoIeni]

Would that work? Is serde serializing keys as separate fields?

I guess we would need to do what the linked PR is doing:

---

(adds a new field called extra). Maybe we can tweak PR a bit to satisfy this use case too.

Yeah, I would need something like that, but without typing extra. So as the remote HashMap 👍

Adding another field called extra_map which is an HashMap would work for example.

[orhun]

This feels like a bit of a workaround and is specific to release-plz's use case.

Maybe we should deprecate individual remote-related fields and instead support commit.remote, as you've suggested. That way, we wouldn't need to make small tweaks in the library like this.

[MarcoIeni]

Sounds good to me as long as the remote field is not behind a feature flag that pulls other dependencies 👍

Should I create a pr that adds this field?
Maybe for now we can just add the field without filling it so that it unlocks release-plz. I.e. it's a field reserved to library users that git cliff can use later after a refactoring

[orhun]

Yup, please go ahead.