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

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

#161

Post by personjerry »

a1studmuffin wrote: post #129

Hell yes, I use it daily. I'm in AAA gamedev and the codebase I deal with goes back 20+ years. The last 10 years are readily accessible in Perforce and the rest can be found in another version control system. I am forever grateful to past engineers for outlining WHY they made their changes, and not WHAT the changes were per se. With thousands of engineers that have come and gone, this is incredibly useful information…

But that sounds like you value documentation, not necessarily the code history

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

#162

Post by leppr »

megous wrote: post #104

The more public and more developers it has, the more I use it. The project where I use it the most is Linux kernel. It's also probably because there's a strong requirement to actually write useful commit descirptions. But if changes come from so many developers, it's very useful to catch up on news, what's coming to the next kernel release, what changed in what driver or subsystem, what might have caused the regressi…

Yea, the only times where I don't use it is when I'm working solo on small projects. Then the dirty tricks like duplicating files into `.bak` or `-ver3`, comment-out unused code for potential reuse later, etc, are actually more time-efficient at least for a non-git wizard like me.

It's invaluable in larger projects, even as small as 2 persons.

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

#164

Post by leviathan »

sjg007 wrote: post #70
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is good. I'm stealing it. It's using git as sort of a super-brain, helping you remember stuff you wouldn't otherwise. It's how I use gmail. Instead of shooting for inbox zero, I just leave anything in there that I might want to remember later and delete the rest. Then, many times years later, I can search through looking for important correspondence. Both of these stories are good examples of how simple but flex…

I use gmail the same way. I do feel that the search functionality could be improved though which I find ironic.

Gmail search used to be the best. Now it fails to find anything useful most of the time

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

#165

Post by sanderjd »

personjerry wrote: post #161
a1studmuffin wrote: post #129

Hell yes, I use it daily. I'm in AAA gamedev and the codebase I deal with goes back 20+ years. The last 10 years are readily accessible in Perforce and the rest can be found in another version control system. I am forever grateful to past engineers for outlining WHY they made their changes, and not WHAT the changes were per se. With thousands of engineers that have come and gone, this is incredibly useful information…

But that sounds like you value documentation, not necessarily the code history

Code history is documentation. There are lots of different kinds of documentation: code API level, module level, system level, tutorials, even books in some cases. Revision history is just another one of those levels, and I believe it is the best at capturing the "why"s of systems rather than just the "what"s.

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

#168

Post by lukeschlather »

When I worked at a large, decade+ big tech company there were several times I looked at running code that was over a decade old. I was working in a section of the business that hadn't existed for more than a decade, so that somewhat bounded how old code could be in my domain, but somehow my team ended up responsible for one thing that was much older, and understanding it took some reading.

There were other core systems that I also read sometimes that were older, and it was extremely useful to understand their construction and function.

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

#169

Post by personjerry »

sanderjd wrote: post #165
personjerry wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that sounds like you value documentation, not necessarily the code history

Code history is documentation. There are lots of different kinds of documentation: code API level, module level, system level, tutorials, even books in some cases. Revision history is just another one of those levels, and I believe it is the best at capturing the "why"s of systems rather than just the "what"s.

I agree code history can be used as a form of documentation, but in cases like this looking through years of code to find the decisions/reasons leading to a particular design seems like inefficient communication. It seems like "real" documentation with a few sentences explaining directly would be more suitable.

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

#170

Post by kazagistar »

The most valuable part for me has been ticket numbers. We prefix every change with a ticket number, and it provides an easy way to answer "why" for any line of code. I wish I could use the comments as well, but that's harder to enforce quality in.

I use git blame and history at least once a week when bug sleuthing, and value it very highly.

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