Re: Let us not call it git blame

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: Mar 3, 2023, 01:31 UTC
Message-ID: <ZAFN2ZoOQzUC/nHo@tapette.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqfsamiul2.fsf@gitster.g>

On 2023-03-02 at 23:47:53, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 22 quoted lines

> "brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> writes:
> 
> > On 2023-03-02 at 22:00:59, Dinesh Dharmawardena wrote:
> >> 
> >> I am writing to you to request that the term blame in git blame
> >> be replaced with something that does not sound so blameful. I’m
> >> an SRE and we actively try promote a blameless culture as such
> >> industry tooling should also follow suit imo. Progressively
> >> phasing this term out with a better alias would be great.
> 
> I actually do not think "git blame" is incompatible with blameless
> culture at all, unless you blindly say "this word is bad, that word
> is not" without thinking.  Blameless culture is about not blaming
> the _person_ who made an earlier mistake, but "git blame" is not
> about finding a person who contributed the badness to the codebase.
> 
> It is all about which _commit_ contributed badness to the current
> codebase (i.e. "these commits are to be blamed for the current
> breakage that made us lose $XM") and it is up to the users how to
> interpret the story behind these found commits.  It often would not
> be the "fault" of the author alone, and striving for blameless
> culture is to find out what led to the mistakes in these commits.

I don't even think it's that all the time. Sometimes I've used git blame to find the author of a commit to ask them questions about a comment or change later on, or to find a commit message or pull request to understand why a change was made.

I'm almost always more interested in learning more about the rationale or reasoning for a commit than blaming a particular user. I have used git blame in the past to find the _team_ that introduced a regression for assigning bugs in triage when the cause is clear (since they'd have the relevant context to understand the necessary change better), but it's very uncommon that I actually use it in anger to blame to a particular person.

-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Toronto, Ontario, CA