> So I ask: at your company and in your experience, do you get value from source-control-arachaeology? And if so, what does that look like in your case? I work

> So I ask: at your company and in your experience, do you get value from source-control-arachaeology? And if so, what does that look like in your case? I work with different code bases, some have 20+ years of history (migrated from RCS to CVS to git). There's no week where I don't go back to look at some kind of history, usually to find out why or when something was done. Often the issue keys / ticket numbers referenced in the commit messages help me when the commit message itself is too opaque to understand. I also like to get a sense of how often a file changes. This gives me a sense of whether the code is likely to be fragile and/or touches often-changing requirements. There is a diminishing return for very old commits, partly because our team was much smaller back then, and communicated less in writing, partly because too much of the context has changed. But two years doesn't qualify as "very old" here, in our case the diminishing returns start more at 5 to 8 years. That said, if I were working with SVN again, I'd likely look at the history much less, because it's that much slower and more painful.