On Jul 22 2007 14:48, Jon Smirl wrote: > > It would really be useful if git diff had an option for suppressing > diffs caused by CVS keyword expansion. I run into this problem over > and over when trying to recover stuff out of old kernel sources that > people checked into CVS and then posted CVS diffs to fulfill their GPL > obligations. I sometimes wonder if vendors are doing this on purpose > to make it more difficult to recover the changes they made to the > code. > > To prevent this in the future, I'd love to see a patch removing all > CVS keywords from the kernel sources. I say: yes please. Even svn (which Linus dislikes very much) has cvs keywords disabled by default. And at the same time, a patch to CodingStyle not to include CVS tags, and a patch to checkpatch.pl to enforce it :) > Quick grep of kernel shows 1,535 $Id, 197 $Log, 441 $Revision, 144 $Date. I > guestimate that this would remove about 5,000 lines form the kernel source > and touch 1,700 files. Would this be accept or do those expansions contain > useful info? Common argument for $Id$ tags has been, that upon a problem, a user can look into dmesg (or whatever log is appropraite - it's not limited to the kernel) for the version string instead of figuring it out himself (by means or rpm -q, or whatever hides it). For the Linux kernel however, I do not think it is important, since: - the code of a module changes faster than you can think (e.g. a change in the network code touched a network filesystem). Result: same $Id$ tag in the vendor's version AND the mainline version. So the tag is useless. - you know what version you are running, mingetty usually prints it for you; uname -a also shows it. - if you have a problem, people kindly ask you to bisect anyway, in which case $Id$ numbers become irrelevant anyway, because you got the git SHA1 ids. Yep, that's pretty much it from my side. Conclusion: Remove CVS tags from kernel. Jan -- - 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
