From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Fri, 18 Dec 2020 11:24:07 -0800 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] Algol 68 and Unix (was cron and at ...) In-Reply-To: References: <0EA02917-243E-4612-9F7E-D370EE0A7C2E@ronnatalie.com> <20201217143558.GD13268@mcvoy.com> <20201217155039.GA13368@mcvoy.com> <20201217180048.GG13368@mcvoy.com> <20201218144332.GH13368@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <20201218192407.GC849@mcvoy.com> 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.