Ask HN: Do you ever truly use your revision history?

Yes, absolutely, every day. Revision history really is a critical part of the development and code review process. My team uses Git/GitHub and for me using diffs across previous commits and the blame representation especially for files in large pull requests gives me a tool to understand the changes better when reviewing changes on older files.

A lot of times when a developer is working on a larger change that could be adding/expanding a feature or doing some larger refactoring, they may fix or improve something loosely related to the primary changes. If the unrelated changes don't have a separate commit I will request a dedicated commit be kept to document and have separate history so we don't lose the context in the larger body of work when squashing prior to merge.

Tagging releases is another tool for tracking revision history across releases that has come in handy for diffing and viewing the state of the code more holistically than looking at files in incremental commits or individual blames.

It's both better and worse than its ever been.

There's an awareness and discussion about "sustainable" development practices, but a large portion of our workforce had to leave for stress reasons last year, on a project that is saying "sustainable development" the loudest.. so while it feels like lip service, at least there's an awareness at some level.

(also, gamers are more entitled than ever, so we're always running; which causes our games to be buggy as hell which slows us down later.. horrible and completely unsustainable)

Like everyone here, “Yes, the history is super useful”. So, I’m curious about fixing the actual problem.

What happened in the CVS => SVN migration? You don’t have 30-years of SVN history. Do you have an SVN mirror / backup for which you can try out the git svn to try to import the codebase?

Besides, it may be 30-years worth of commits, but I’d guess it’s smaller than the LLVM SVN repo was at the time of the first git mirroring. How many commits are you talking about? (Including all branches, etc.).

PR descriptions/discussions, ADRs, and READMEs are often germane and useful, but the revision history itself? No, almost never. Any rationale motivating a piece of code as it exists in the repo is, in my experience, best provided as a comment in-situ with the code. Information that's in the revision history but not in that kind of comment is, in my experience, historical noise.

I used to get irritated that peers made me jump through hoops to collapse commits into singular meaningful commits. Why bother. Nobody looks at history.

And then I started looking at history and its invaluable to have particularly when understanding rationale or debugging issues.