Subject: Re: Proposal: tell git a file has been renamed

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2023 12:41:45 -0700

Jeremy Morton <[email-masked]> writes:

> The standard answer for this is to rename the file in one commit, then
> make the changes.

Oh, by the way, this is a pure myth that would unlikely be helpful
in the bigger picture.

When you rename and heavily modify the resulting new path because
you have to solve something, such a work would likely be done on the
same topic branch.  One step of it may be a pure rename, and other
steps may involve heavily changing the renamed result, or you may
update the contents in the original and the do a rename at the end,
but either way, when you integrate the end result of the whole topic
branch into the master history, what such a merge will see is that
the original file has disappeared and a new file with contents not
at all similar to the disappeared file has appeared.  "pure rename
with changes in separate commits" would have no effect when showing
such a history with "git log --first-parent -p" for a birds-eye
view.