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I have my PhD thesis under revision control (git), with a master file (~/Thesis/thesis.tex) using the \include command to include the chapters (~/Thesis/tex/chapter1.tex, etc).
Is there a way to include the revision information of each separate chapter in the header of each page for each respective chapter?
I thought I was getting somewhere with a combination of the gitinfo and fancyhdr packages, but I'm not sure if you can have different revision headers under gitinfo.
Not directly, no; git doesn't distinguish between files (or something like that) and it doesn't store metadata on the last revision that affected each file.
I think the best option would be to write a post-commit hook that looked at the changed files and wrote a timestamp corresponding to each. E.g., iterate through the output of
git show --pretty="format:" --name-only master
and write a <filename>.datestamp file when each file is seen.
This file could then be read directly into a header/footer to show when the chapter was lasted edited.
gitinfoonly provides information for the current HEAD. I considered the approach you're suggesting, but it may be unsafe if, for example, you have a private style file in your project that affects the output, but doesn't actually "appear on a page". Knowing the revision id for the whole project does allow you to know exactly which versions of files were used, but obviously in a less-convenient manner.