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Because that history is way too coarse to answer the kind of questions that a VCS can answer. And because they already have a VCS, and are just stubbornly unwi
by ef4 12y ago
Because that history is way too coarse to answer the kind of questions that a VCS can answer.
And because they already have a VCS, and are just stubbornly unwilling to share all that useful information with the wider community.
- meepmorp 12y agoWhat questions do you need to answer at a finer level of granularity? Is it really critical to know that someone fixed a typo in something day over day, but that the typo wasn't included in any releases? I get that this clashes with the culture you're used to working in, but I don't see where it's actually impactful in a real world sense. edit: a slight rewording
- ef4 12y agoI search through other people's commit histories all the time. Commit logs are by far the most thorough documentation you'll find in the typical codebase. Not for the big things that appear in changelogs, but for the little things like "why the heck does this line work that way?" Giving Weitse the benefit of the doubt, his commit logs are probably very useful indeed, and not sharing them makes the codebase that much less useful to everyone else. Edit to add: the canonical example is bisection. When something breaks, it is awesome to bisect it down to the precise change that broke it. Bisection lets you narrow the scope down to a vastly smaller problem space than a whole release would.