Re: Joining Repositories

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Jan 18, 2006, 19:09 UTC
Message-ID: <7vslrluze6.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0601181010410.3240@g5.osdl.org>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> writes:

Show 9 quoted lines

> On Wed, 18 Jan 2006, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> 
>> Tracking history across renames is something we have only half
>> of the needed support.  We can notice rename points but there is
>> no way to tell our usability tools to automatically follow it.
>> IOW "whatchanged r1/hello.c" will stop at the point the
>> original project renamed hello.c
>
> Note that "whatchanged" really really _really_ must not follow renames.

Sorry for having brought up the issue again. I personally do not disagree with you. Because I did not want to waste your time rehashing it, I attempted to make it absolutely clear that I was talking about an _optional_ way to tell the tool to do so, when somebody so used to "annotate" wants to. Obviously my attempt did not work well X-<.

Show 7 quoted lines

> I realize that this is heresy to people who are used to "annotate" and 
> want to follow not the path, but the "conceptual inode", but the thing is, 
> paths really really are a lot more important to a maintainer. Following an 
> individual file is a secondary issue.
> ...
> In other words, tracking pathnames is really _fundamentally_ a more 
> powerful operation.

I agree with you including this part. At the same time, I think annotate-minded people would find it useful if there were an option (or a separate program similar to whatchanged) that notices file or directory renames, and adjusts the initial path limiter, probably by adding not replacing the new "possibly relevant" paths it discovered to it.