Comments on: Code Tells You How Revision History Tells You Why

By: telma bonilla

telma bonilla — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 07:43:56 +0000

Oscar,
I am very impressed with this code stuff which understanding does not come easily to me, but as you say in your personality profile, when something comes your way you do not know about you research; that is just like me!
I was in Guatemala and have lived in the USA for 30 years and have brother
whose name is like yours, but I have not seen him since I moved to the US. I would appreciate if you contact me at my email address.
Thanks,
Telma

By: lm

lm — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 03:21:37 +0000

Part of the reason that we don’t have lots of comments in the BitKeeper source base is that maintaining them is hard. We go for the combination of

a) make the code simple (aka, make me understand it and I’m stupid)
b) comment the stuff that is not simple

While I can see the issue of switching gears, once you have a version control system that gives you insight you don’t see it as switching, you see it as digging deeper.

By: Ben

Ben — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 06:25:00 +0000

I use emacs, and with a combination of vc-annotate and vc-annotate-show-log-revision-at-line, showing the svn log for a line is very easy.

Using emacs-22, I was able to bind the separate commands together in a macro, which I can post below, but you may have to create and then save the macro yourself:

(fset 'log-history-for-line "\C-xvgL")
(global-set-key "\C-cwtf" 'log-history-for-line)

Now, I can type: Ctrl-c wtf and it will tell me what the commit message was for that line!

By: Oscar Bonilla

Oscar Bonilla — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 17:14:00 +0000

I have shortcuts in my editor that give me that information with a key press. Some systems (like subversion) take too long to get a fully annotated version, which is something that’s instantaneous in BitKeeper. My personal opinion is that people don’t rely more on history because the current tools for browsing history suck.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 10:55:00 +0000

I generally agree with what you are saying, but the problem is that doing the annotate and then looking up the check-in comment is generally a hassle. It requires my mind to shift gears thinking about the revision control system rather than the code I'm browsing. That's generally bad because it's hard to get back on track.

Maybe I need a mode in my editor where hovering over a line of code with the mouse pops up a tool tip with all the checkin comments that have affected that line of code... Something that you don't have to think about...

I often find myself repeating myself in comments and in the commit log, and that annoys me a bit. Especially because the commit log is usually better written since I've already practiced writing the comment in the code. :-)

-David