On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 04:28:49PM -0500, Nicolas Pitre wrote: > > Besides being just one more directory to go up and down, it does make > > history browsing more annoying. As much as I love git's "don't record > > renames" philosophy, our handling of renames on the viewing side is > > often annoying. I already get annoyed sometimes following stuff across > > the s!builtin-!builtin/! change. This would be like that but more so. > > So... we do suck at something? So why not take this opportunity to > shake yourself out of this easy comfort and improve Git as a result on > both front? :-) Yes, we do suck at rename following. The problem is that it is partially an implementation issue, and partially a fundamental issue. Obviously --follow sucks pretty hard right now, and that could be fixed. Namely it follows only a single file, and it interacts very badly with history simplification. But even with those things fixed, there will still be annoyances. It will still be _slower_ to turn it on all the time, for one[1]. And that's due to fundamental design decisions of the git data structure. And I'm not knocking those decisions; I think they made the right tradeoff. But that doesn't mean we don't pay the cost for that tradeoff. And no matter what your model, renames can be annoying. On-going topics will have a painful rebase or merge. And people looking at history will have to deal with the code-base having different names at different points. Yeah, you can say it's all just "content", but the filenames we put things in are actually useful. So I don't think it's wrong to say "renames are a pain, and so should not be done lightly". I do think it's wrong to say "renames can't be done"; I just the cost needs to be considered. -Peff [1] I'd be interested to see how much we can get around that slowness using a notes-cache. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html