Re: Rename handling

From: Steven Grimm <koreth@midwinter.com>
Date: Mar 19, 2007, 19:36 UTC
Message-ID: <45FEE629.8030606@midwinter.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.83.0703191427140.18328@xanadu.home>

Nicolas Pitre wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> Well...  the fact that you _still_ use GIT even in the face of a 1% 
> probability that it might guess renames wrong (according to your own 
> numbers) should mean that you didn't felt switching to Mercurial was 
> worth the 100% guarantee for rename identification.
>

Yes, that's right, for me that's the correct tradeoff. For the person who asked the original question, it may or may not be. He seemed a lot more worried about the situation than I am. In my environment renames are relatively rare events, but maybe in his they happen more often.

> And some will argue that explicit renames are susceptible to user error 
> misidentifying the rename too, certainly in the 1% figure of all renames 
> if not more.
>

If you're using "git mv" instead of "mv" to do the rename, it is impossible to misidentify the rename since the rename and identification are happening in the same command with no additional inputs that could confuse anything. If you are talking about adding a new tool that can manually tag a rename after the fact, then I can't disagree with you except to say that the fact that no such command exists today means any estimate of user error rate is pure speculation.

Aside from that, the possibility of user error is an entirely different thing than the possibility of tool error -- if I misidentify a rename, I will blame myself, not the version control system, and rightly so. People are expected to make mistakes from time to time. But if my version control tool misidentifies a rename on my behalf, and there's nothing I can do about it because there's no way to influence the tool's concept of what got renamed to what, then I'm not going to consider it a failure of the tool, not a mistake on my part.

> So maybe, just maybe, at the end of the day getting renames right 100% 
> of the time instead of 99% is not such a big thing after all.
>

For me personally, that is true -- but I'd still prefer that extra 1%.

-Steve