Re: Rename handling

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Mar 21, 2007, 00:25 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0703210120230.22628@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>
In-Reply-To: <etpson$qih$1@sea.gmane.org>

Hi,

On Wed, 21 Mar 2007, Jakub Narebski wrote:

Show 40 quoted lines

> Steven Grimm wrote:
> 
> > The following is actually my biggest beef with git's rename tracking, 
> > and it has nothing whatsoever to do with git-log (though I agree git-log 
> > needs to track renames too):
> > 
> > $ ls
> > dir1
> > $ ls dir1
> > file1 file2 file3
> > $ echo "#include file1" > dir1/file4
> > $ git add dir1/file4
> > $ git commit
> > $ git pull
> > $ ls
> > dir1 dir2
> > $ ls dir1
> > file4
> > $ ls dir2
> > file1 file2 file3
> > 
> > That's just plain broken in my opinion. One can perhaps contrive a test 
> > case or two where that's the desired behavior, but in the real world it 
> > is almost never what you actually want.
> > 
> > By the way, I don't think fixing that is necessarily related to how 
> > renames get detected, so in some sense it's a different bug report / 
> > feature request than the rename hints one. It would be possible to 
> > figure out the directory had been renamed based purely on content 
> > analysis; a bunch of files all individually renamed to the same places 
> > under a new directory, and a lack of any files at all left in the old 
> > one, probably means the directory got renamed. The content-based rename 
> > detector could handle this case.
>  
> Actually this came out in some earlier talk about recording renames 
> and renames detection (IIRC in the big thread about VCS comparison which
> used to be on Bazaar-NG wiki). And one of the arguments about why directory
> rename doesn't work as _you_ expected is (beside that it is not that
> easy to code) the fact that the alternate solution (new files going
> to old subdir) can be correct and expected by _others_.

By now, there have been enough arguments _for_ automatic rename detection, but I'll add another one.

A colleague of mine worked on a certain file in a branch, where he copied the file to another location, and heavily modified it. He did that in a branch, and when he was satisfied with the result, he deleted the old file, since he liked the new location better.

Now, when I pulled, imagine my surprise (knowing the history of the file), when the pull reported a rename with a substantial similarity!

So, the automatic renamer did an awesome job.

Ciao, Dscho

P.S.: It would be so nice if somebody (preferably someone who previously 
thought manual renames were a pretty clever thing) to write up the 
arguments, and add that to the "why automatic renaming?" section of the 
FAQ...