[COFF] [TUHS] Algol 68 and Unix (was cron and at ...)

[lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 12:41:58PM -0500, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> Code archeology
> is *definitely* a powerful tool, but this relies on the source control
> metadata is sufficiently rich; in some cases, having links to bug
> trackers or mailing list discussions are super-useful.
> 
> 	    	    	 	     	 - Ted

Believe it or not, this is one of my major complaints about Git, it only
has commit comments, there are no per file comments (because there is no
per file meta data other than contents, type, and permissions).

BitKeeper has full per file meta data including comments, user who made
the change, etc.  Which means you can have commits that have more than
one author.

The GUI tool we built for checkins had 3 panes:

	list 
	of
	files
	that
	are
	changed
	--------------
	space
	for
	comments
	-------------
	diffs
	for
	current
	file

The ChangeSet file, which is just another version controlled file that
is the manifest for the repository, its graph is the same graph as Git
has, is always the last file of the list of files, but here is the trick:
the diffs for the ChangeSet file were all the comments you just typed
in.  So what do people do?  On the files, they tended to say what they
did to that file, some bread crumbs specific to that file.  On the 
ChangeSet file, seeing all those comments, they tended "up level" their
comments and provide more of a "what" than a "how".

Intel looked at the quality of the checkin comments done at the command
line vs those done with the GUI tool and mandated the use of GUI tool,
the comments were _that_ much more useful.