Comment by convolvatron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by convolvatron | Hacker News Reader

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thank you for saying this. I'm always afraid to. revision control is a necessary safety net and facilitates discussion around changes (PRs). but people act as if the history is somehow _really really important_.

I've seen someone post on HN, apparently seriously, that the history is more important than the source.

I know a (potentially) really good developer that spends his time pulling in the recent patches and reorganizing them to make an alternate history that is prettier somehow.

sure, every once and a while it because useful/necessary to bisect, and a 'clean' history might help with that.

but seriously - why do we fetishize this? this is a medium where the amount of writing vastly outweighs the amount of reading.

when people are looking for a bug do they seriously find value in seeing how the code evolved? or do they just figure out why it doesn't work? is there an implicit assumption that the code all worked at some point and the task is to find out when/how it was broken?

just really confused

Yes, going back and understanding why something broke/has changed is incredibly valuable. Often it's not because of one singular decision but a collection of decisions over time that resulted in some behavioural regression. Being able to easily hop through all the commits of the recent past is incredibly valuable for me to understand how we can prevent such errors in the future, not just patch over the current one and move on. Fixing things without considering how we got here I tend to find leads to messy code; extra checks and assertions that aren't necessary if one takes the time to update the underlying assumption or modules that end up too tightly coupled because an extra bit of logic is added to fix that one bug.

Obviously it's possible to go too far; not every commit needs an attached essay. Many of my commits are just "fixed typo" or "added unit test for X", but then sometimes I'll write a short paragraphs or two explaining my rationale, referencing the commits that came before

Yeah I love picking my way thru junk commits/comments. You may as well not use VCS.

what were you hoping to accomplish in the first place?

I look thru history when I am building on top of stuff that already exists. In a complex system that has been around for a while, how else do can you figure things out?

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