Re:Two Years of Squash Merge (2019)
by u801e on Friday April 30, 2021 @11:28PM
(#27002781)
> Do people here have examples of some bugs for which they had to resort to VCS history to find the cause?
A more common scenario is to run git blame on the files you plan to modify to see what commits were responsible for them. If the message is detailed enough, you can avoid introducing a regression because you altered logic introduced by a commit to fix a bug.
> If there's information in commit messages that isn't evident in the code itself, that seems a terrible way to live.
Good commit messages include why a change was made, which usually isn't really reflected in the code itself. Comments may be outdated if the code is changed without updating the comments, but the git blame output for a line of code is timeless because the associated between that commit and line of code isn't lost until the line itself is updated.
A more common scenario is to run git blame on the files you plan to modify to see what commits were responsible for them. If the message is detailed enough, you can avoid introducing a regression because you altered logic introduced by a commit to fix a bug.
> If there's information in commit messages that isn't evident in the code itself, that seems a terrible way to live.
Good commit messages include why a change was made, which usually isn't really reflected in the code itself. Comments may be outdated if the code is changed without updating the comments, but the git blame output for a line of code is timeless because the associated between that commit and line of code isn't lost until the line itself is updated.