Yes, VCS doesn't give you a guarantee of storing your history (in an accessible way, I mean - "if a tree falls in a forest...") FOREVER, especially if you switc

Yes, VCS doesn't give you a guarantee of storing your history (in an accessible way, I mean - "if a tree falls in a forest...") FOREVER, especially if you switch VCS systems on the way. However, commenting some code out also doesn't mean it won't rot. Methods/procedures around it will be refactored, variables renamed - in long time perspective, in a different landscape it can become incomprehensible and useless anyway. Just because some abstraction (version control) can be a bit leaky and one shouldn't rely on it absolutely, doesn't justify succumbing to some other illusion. Commenting code out is not equal to hibernation and it doesn't make it immune to flowing time. You uncomment it one day, you discover it stinks to heaven high - especially if it was complex from the start - and isn't informative at all. "But that's not the case here!" - well, guess what: version control failing to do what it's supposed to also isn't the case here, if you can still access commits from 1986, as someone pointed out: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/log/?ofs=124080 http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/log/?ofs=124080