Hi Jeff, On Sat, 30 Sep 2017, Jeff Hostetler wrote: > On 9/29/2017 7:12 PM, Johannes Schindelin wrote: > > > Therefore, it would be good to have a way to tell Git about renames > > explicitly so that it does not even need to use its heuristics. > > Agreed. > > It would be nice if every file (and tree) had a permanent GUID > associated with it. Then the filename/pathname becomes a property > of the GUIDs. Then you can exactly know about moves/renames with > minimal effort (and no guessing). But I suppose that ship has sailed... Yes, that ship has sailed. But we still could teach Git to understand certain "hints" (that would be really more like "cluebats"). So while we cannot have any GUIDs that are persistent across renames/moves (and which users would probably get wrong all the time by using third-party tools that are not Git-rename aware), we have unique identifiers: the object names. And we could easily have a lookup table of pairs of object names, telling Git that they were source and target of a rename. When Git would try to figure out whether anything was renamed, it would first look at that lookup table and save itself a lot of work (and opportunity to fail) and short-cut the rename detection. Ciao, Johannes
