Subject: Re: Directory renames (was Re: blame follows renames, but log doesn't)

From: Steven Grimm <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2007 13:59:45 -0700

Sam Vilain wrote:
> I didn't review your test cases in detail, but they seemed to suffer
> from what I call "over-trivialization"; the heuristic methods don't work
> very well for these non-real-world test cases because they're not long
> enough.  Are you confident that these deficiencies are still there with
> longer examples?
>   

Those test cases were a demonstration of something I actually ran into 
on a real-world project yesterday. The test cases are trivial and short 
simply to make them easy to follow in an email message. If you 
substitute longer contents for the test files in my example, you will 
see the exact same behavior. The real file in question is around 2KB 
long, not a monster but presumably long enough that the heuristics 
should work.

Also -- though this doesn't happen to be relevant in the case where I 
ran into this -- not all files in real-world projects are huge. If the 
heuristics break on small test-case files then they will break on small 
real-world files too. If nothing else, a real-world project can itself 
contain trivial test data (for testing the project, not testing the 
version control system) in the form of lots of small files with similar 
or identical contents.

-Steve