Re: Let us not call it git blame

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Mar 2, 2023, 23:47 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqfsamiul2.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <ZAEgRDelTlNZRJ5J@tapette.crustytoothpaste.net>

"brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> writes:

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> 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.

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> I believe there's already an alias for it, git annotate, if you'd
> prefer to use that.  The name "blame" came in with CVS, with the
> synonym "annotate", so it's well understood, but you can use
> whichever alias you prefer.
>
> I do think there may some differences in the defaults between git
> annotate and git blame, but if someone wanted to send in a patch for an
> option to make annotate produce identical output to blame, then I think
> it could be a full replacement.

At that point we can retire "git blame" and make it a built-in alias to "git annotate --behave-like-git-blame". Then we will come full circle ;-)

Thanks.