Subject: Re: blame follows renames, but log doesn't

From: Sam Vilain <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2007 13:34:22 +1200

Martin Langhoff wrote:
> And I kind of hate having to reply to things like these
> 
>     http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/125

I think that there should be clear conventions for how to place such
breadcrumbs in the commit log, that can be suitably ignored or honoured.

At least these two things fit into this category:

  1. renaming.  A comment on a changelog entry saying "I moved this file
     from A to B in this commit".  With all of the user friendliness and
     limitations this implies (oh, you got the information wrong or
     didn't put it in?  oh well, now history is b0rked forever, HAND)

  2. cherry picking.  bzr uses patch UUIDs, with all of the user
     friendliness and limitations this implies (oh, you merged that
     patch and accidentally didn't pick any changes?  whoops, it's
     in your history anyway so never try to merge that again).

Perhaps also there should be other conventions for how to encode other
strange data out of the namespace of the filesystem ("in a different
dimension", perhaps) like "file attributes".

Sam.