Re: Rename handling

From: Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
Date: Mar 19, 2007, 20:17 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.83.0703191608340.18328@xanadu.home>
In-Reply-To: <45FEE629.8030606@midwinter.com>

On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Steven Grimm wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> > 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.

I was actually referring to someone using cp + rm + {svn|hg|whatever} to commit a rename in which case the tool won't know. And I'm sure that happens more than 1% of the time.

Show 5 quoted lines

> 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.

Sure.

Show 7 quoted lines

> 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.

But GIT's rename heuristics can be modified/improved, and all renames that were wrongly identified before will suddenly be fixed.

If the rename is part of the recorded history then there is nothing you can do to fix mistakes, be it human or tool based.

Show 5 quoted lines

> > 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%.

I'm sure the human screwups is at _least_ in the 1% range. So even if you think you should know better, being a human you'll make a mistake eventually so you won't have that 100% anyway.

Nicolas