Idea: utility to stage changes (and do git commits) by user and datetime

[jon-freed]

Hi - This is somewhat related to my preceding post: #3329

It would be nice to have a utility that could take information from three sources:

1. retrieved metadata in source format
2. information about which of those files have changed relative to the git repository (based on git status)
3. information about who changed the files and when (derived from the metadata list functionality)

.... and combine that information to do groups of staging and committing actions for each uninterrupted group of changes by an author. Each such group could be sequentially staged and then committed with commands like this:

GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="Jane Doe" \
GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="[email protected]" \
GIT_AUTHOR_DATE="2022-12-31T23:59:00" \
git commit -m "Changes by Jane Doe between YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS and YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS"

If this were done, then the git repository would accurately reflect who made the changes in the Salesforce org instance and not just who retrieved and committed those changes to git.

Yes, there are a lot of reasons why this either wouldn't work well or it would be very fragile. Regardless, this kind of utility would be great for helping keep track of who made what changes and when, especially in environments where developers/administrators haven't steadfastly checked their work into git.