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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

Who gives a shit about a single commit that converts tabs-to-spaces? How is this a problem in any way?

The real problem here is that “git blame” is a garbage tool. Perforce has “timelapse view” that is radically better than any historical view I’ve seen in Git/Hg.

With respect to this issue, git just needs to suck less.

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You answered your own question. Git blame is a pretty crappy tool but it's a tool that a lot of people use nevertheless. If you have a commit that converts tabs to spaces, then the blame for pretty much every single line will be lost before that point.

Does Git not offer a way to view the blame from an earlier version? This would let you skip past the wall.

My company has a web tool for browsing the repo that allows this. It’s still inferior to Perforce timelapse view. But it’s not a hard blocker.

    git blame WS_COMMIT^ -- FILE

You’ll need to change the file name, though, if it’s been renamed since the whitespace change.

Yea, you just have to checkout the version of that file from before the white spaces commit. Then run git blame on it.

yes of course, instead of git blame HEAD file you just specify whichever ref you want

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