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Comment by pvg | Hacker News Reader

Hard to tell without context but these read very much version control commit messages, an audit trail nicely maintained by a VCS, along with the code it refers to. I think the main reason you see those sort of 'history of the world' comments is force of habit and the more cumbersome operation of older VC systems.

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Unfortunately, companies do occasionally change version control systems. History also tends to get lost when the codebase of one project is imported as the beginning of another.

However, the current version control systems usually have compatibility layers and/or import tools.

We have a project that started wih CVS, then moved to SVN and now runs on Hg, and we have the complete commit log (including commits from the CVS and SVN days) in the current repository.

I don't think 'history tends to get lost'. It happens, both intentionally and unintentionally but preservation of history is a big, often deciding factor in such a switch.

These types of comments are common, I think, not so much because it's so hard to migrate history but because the VCS in use doesn't have facilities for cheap local commit and there's no immediate local history. The workaround is to place important version-change information straight in the source. Which is perfectly sensible in those circumstances, I just disagree with the OP's idea that this is somehow a desirable or best practice.

If you treat the source code history as an essential artifact of the development process, and a piece of the product's history (which it is), then it is complete foolishness to switch systems without bringing the history over.

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