On 4/24/2023 12:25 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote: > Erik Cervin Edin wrote: >> On Mon, Apr 24, 2023 at 1:17 PM Jeremy Morton <admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> >>> There's no getting away from the fact that this adds a lot of (IMHO >>> unnecessary) work if you've already done a rename that git can't >>> detect and have both that and a bunch of other changes sitting in the >>> index. What feels like it would be a natural resolution in these >>> cases, though, is a "no, this remove/add is actually a rename" command. >> >> It can definitely be both arduous and non-obvious how to deal with this. >> >> The problem is that such a command cannot exist atm. because renames >> don't exist, they are only interpreted. So the only way to achieve >> this is to revert enough of the contents staged to the index such that >> the rename is detected. The only way to do that in a foolproof manner >> is reverting all the staged changes except the path so that the moved >> file in the index is identical to the old file in HEAD. > > I agree recording renames explicitely might be a good addition to git, but the > real question is how are they going to be stored in the object storage. > > My guess is that it can be added in the commit object after "committer", just > add a "renames" field with all the renames, or one "rename" field per rename. > It would be backwards compatible because any field can be added this way. > > How to generate these fields is a separate issue: first things first. > The other end of the solution space is to try to find ways to make the rename detection logic more accurate. We wouldn't need to store such a rename if the detection gave the correct answer in the first place. You can already kind of do this by modifying the similarity values when searching for renames: the -M option takes a percentage for how similar files need to be in order for it to be a rename. The default is 50%, meaning that the files have to stay at least 50% the same in order to be considered a rename. One potential in the case for renames which also must change class names, etc could be a mechanism to say "treat it as a rename if the content is the same after performing this replacement", where you could specify what string is being replaced in the rename somehow. This could easily be done for reviewing a previous change, but specifically how to *store* this expression so you don't need to remember such values in the future is a bigger challenge.
