> Originally? None. Although note that a lot of earlyish GNU codebases kept tons of older versions of source files around in the form of Emacs versioned backup

> Originally? None. Although note that a lot of earlyish GNU codebases kept tons of older versions of source files around in the form of Emacs versioned backup files, and there were RCS-conversion scripts that would commit all of those as RCS versions... [There would be no log messages for those older versions, of course, but the writers and creation dates of the older files were potentially available... I don't really remember whether those conversion scripts actually used that info or not, although I think they did...]