Re: [Evolution-hackers] History is gone after wip/gsettings branch merge

[Patrick Ohly <patrick ohly gmx de>]

On Mon, 2011-11-28 at 10:59 +0100, Milan Crha wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-11-28 at 10:15 +0100, Patrick Ohly wrote:
> > On Mon, 2011-11-28 at 08:27 +0100, Milan Crha wrote:
> > > 	Hi,
> > > I just realized a very sad thing, the history of certain files is gone
> > > after the merge of wip/gsettings branch into evolution master. I tried
> > > both gitk and git log on mail/e-mail-session.c and the history is ending
> > > on October 6th, 2010.
> > 
> > I had a copy of the git repo before that merge and the history of that
> > file also ended on that date. I doubt that this has anything to do with
> > any git merge.
> 
> Hrm, is it?

Actually I now doubt that my git repo was old enough. I thought you
talked about the account settings, which is the one which I hadn't
pulled yet.

Either way, a git merge doesn't rewrite history.

> I know it's a new file, but I thought it's older than
> October 6th, 2010.

It seems that a06e4484b on October 6th, 2010 renamed and modified the
file (mail-session.c -> e-mail-session.c) at the same time. That defeats
git's --follow and --find-renames heuristics.

That's actually an argument in favor of doing merges instead of just
applying the final, resulting patch: the file renaming can be committed
in a single commit together with the related changes (autotools, include
statements) without changing the file content itself. Then in a separate
commit, make the actual changes to the content. That is easier to review
(because the diffs will be much smaller) and I bet that "git log" would
be able to show the full history for the renamed file.

Very interesting discussion :-) SyncEvolution almost never accepts new
features via merging, instead applying the final, squashed patch. The
argument was that a linear development history is easier to read. But it
does have this disadvantage of not handling rename+modification and also
looses valuable history about the patch itself, or at least makes it
harder to find.

-- 
Bye, Patrick Ohly
--  
Patrick Ohly gmx de
http://www.estamos.de/