3 ms·
Better tooling is definitely feasible, but confounding formatting and semantic changes also messes up blame for the affected lines and often makes a line's hist
by piotrkaminski 6y ago
Better tooling is definitely feasible, but confounding formatting and semantic changes also messes up blame for the affected lines and often makes a line's history misleading.
- dpcx 6y agoThe problem I've found with this statement is that then no one ever changes formatting for fear of "messing up blame for the affected lines," and then no reformatting ever gets done. At some point, take the leap and do it (assuming you're not completely changing the formatting of the entire file/project/what-have-you).
- jsnell 6y agoBlame is also a tool. If a reasonable change messes up blame, that's a tooling problem :) For example git-blame can ignore whitespace, detect code movement inside a file, and even code movement across files. There's no reason why that has to be the limit of how smart blame can be.