By the way, git blaming is really misunderstood by a lot of people; its NOT about who did it, its about which commit is to blame -- that's different.
'git blame' is named after the subversion and CVS blame features that do the same thing. Subversion docs are clear that it's a snarky name and that 'svn praise' and 'svn annotate' are neutral synonyms.
Perhaps someone familiar with CVS can comment on its history there since it seems to be the first source control to add it.
EDIT: and one of the main reasons it's a useful feature is it tells you who to talk to to understand a piece of code, or to coordinate a roll back, or to do any other sort of communication. It probably matters more in a big company where code is changing frequently and you're unlikely to know everyone and what they're working on.
It's actually a pretty awful feature because it misses so much context. I've been blamed before for changes which were technically my fault, but while my code was to spec, some unrelated part of the code I was interacting with was not (iirc it was some multi-threaded nonsense like a race condition or something).
It was a super-stressful week of constantly having to defend my design decisions and white-boarding my thought process (think of the "am I taking crazy pills?!?" scene in Zoolander) as my senior coworker tried to gaslight and throw me under the bus.
Maybe I've had a uniquely bad experience with it, but I've vowed to never use it (as a way to attribute `blame`). Code should be holistically understood and it's your job as a technical leader to know how the parts move, resolve issues without drama, and make sure your whole team is on the same page: this is a cohesive team, not an adversarial dick-measuring contest.
For instance, I may want to change some basic behavior. Easy enough, spend some time implementing and testing, and then run into a downstream consequence of that change while implementing. Now I need to make a decision. Reviewing the history of the relevant sections of code, using git blame, can help me uncover the context and ways in which the code I'm puzzling about changing has changed previously. This can be incredibly valuable and speed up or even obviate an amount of discussion around the potential change.
Obligatory T-Shirt link
https://www.amazon.com/Blame-Ruining-Friendships-Since-T-Shi...
> Code should be holistically understood and it's your job as a technical leader to know how the parts move
That's true when we design something. Once the design is done, and is broken, we have to tear it back apart to understand WHAT is broken. That's when blame is useful.
I love using git blame. I love it even more when it comes back with something I made, because then I get to learn. When something I thought was safe turned out to break something, that's an invaluable chance to understand the system better.
That being said, I've totally used the blame output to end a series of excuses from a junior about how "his code was definitely right, but everything else was garbage" because I really do not care. If it worked before, but doesn't work now, that's a problem. Part of the modern process of "fail fast" is also to build up taste about which parts of a working system are spooky.
I find that some people take the "blameless" culture too far, and use it as an excuse not to reflect on outcomes. They just ruffle the code whenever there's a big, and don't think critically about why that bug appeared. What that tells us about the system we're making.
Ofc as my org has gotten bigger, we've lost a lot of the discipline around writing good commit messages so now it's just a mess of large code-changes with 1-line "bugfix" explainations :(
I have a battle at the moment to try and get the team I am in (5 devs) to take their git commit messages and history seriously, but the "TL" has said that he "doesn't care that much about commits/history/etc"
That bit us right on the ass when debugging someone elses branch recently, because the state needed to fix was across three seemingly unconnected commits, so a checkout of one commit + fix then needed to be tested across two other commits.
Aviation is the shining example of this, combining high traceability (you should be able to track each part back to the factory and to all the technicians who have worked on it) with accident inquiries that are focused around finding cause and avoiding future risks rather than assigning blame.
A few years ago, some Atlassian developer changed "Blame" in the BitBucket UI to "Annotate". I remember a lot of people being frustrated because they couldn't find "blame" anywhere and the change was never officially announced. It just happened one day
Someone opened a ticket with BitBucket about it which ended up drawing a lot of attention from frustrated users who couldn't find "blame", and their searches for it on Google led people to the ticket. Atlassian eventually responded saying that they made the change because "blame" sounds bad and can hurt people's feelings somehow (with no examples given of course, though ironically the dev who made the change certainly had hurt feelings after the upset masses had some choice words for the short-sighted decision. Though Atlassian doubled down and I believe closed the ticket without reverting the change, so the confusion remains, as far as I know)
I don't think that they ever mentioned the Subversion/CVS parallel that was drawn to choose that name, so it was really confusing why that was selected. But this comment shed some light on that ancient incident
Dev probably became the public face for a decision made by someone else (eg. Product owner, TL, whatever the business structure is in Atlassian)
Nomenclature matters. Do not reinvent terms just for fun.
The feelings hurt thing is real, unfortunately for myself I am that person that gets butthurt but it's a phrasing thing, "why did you do this?" vs. something more neutral sounding like "hey this has this side effect are you aware".
Anyway unfortunately in my case too we're not allowed to write tests so it really is an exercise in omniscience.
You should also write tests. They ensure that your code works as intended. Some teammates might not understand that untested code can cause more development time since broken features will have to be fixed in production, so highlighting bugs that have to be fixed as well as writing tests thst cover as many cases as possible should shine some light for those still not understanding their value
Sometimes it's easier to adopt better practices when moving to another team or project altogether
I really want to find or build a tool that can automatically traverse history this way, like git-evolve-log.
(Work hardening is a metalworking term where metal bent back and forth (or hammered) too much becomes brittle; an analogous effect shows up in code, where a piece of code that has been bugfixed a couple of times will probably be need more fixes; there was a published result a decade or so back about using this to focus QA efforts...)
Example output based on Linux kernel @ "Cregit-Linux: how code gets into the kernel": https://cregit.linuxsources.org/
I learned of Cregit recently--just submitted it to HN after seeing multiple recent HN comments discussing issues related to line-based "blame" annotation granularity:
"Cregit-Linux: how code gets into the kernel": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43451654
And the committer and author don’t even need to be the same!
But the point, as I read it, is: what matters is the context, i.e. if a line is faulty, how did things look like when it wasn’t faulty? The commit’s content is more often more important than the committer, although the committer is useful because you can ask them if they’re still around.
Linking a line of code back to the commit is useful even if you can't ask the author about it. It tells you what other lines of code are involved and what the overall purpose is. It's significantly more useful if you can link it into documentation outside the code: ticketing systems, requirements docs, etc.
The main limit to svn blame in that situation was that quite often it would hit commit 1, when the codebase had been imported from Visual SourceSafe.
git blame is about which author most recently touched each line (in what commit); i.e. is to "blame" for that line having its current content.
You're right in that git blame is most useful for finding which commit touched a line. What was done in the commit is more important than who did it.
git blame is very useful even in a solo project where you already know that you wrote every commit.
There is such a concept as a brand new project not requiring version control until it hits a certain stage: you know it when you get there.
Edit: A large part of the reason now that I think about it is that I don't work off real tickets but just bugs I notice or things that get mentioned on the current solo work project. In a team I can just dissect the ticket and am forced to do only that ticket on the branch whereas solo I'm just jumping all over the place. Sometimes I'll do thing X partway, start considering options and in the meantime do thing Y so it's a mess but the tasks get done so.. For context the project is 1 year old developed from 0 by me. Essentially an internal log parsing and analysis tool for a couple formats. Nothing particularly complex.
The manpage explains what the command does. How and why it's used is up to the user.
"git blame" and similar tools often always show my name, even though I didn't write the code.
[0] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-blame#Documentation/git-blame.t...
Particularly so if I can see that someone wrote bad code, so I can review the rest of their code.
Example output based on Linux kernel @ "Cregit-Linux: how code gets into the kernel": https://cregit.linuxsources.org/
I learned of Cregit recently--just submitted it to HN after seeing multiple recent HN comments discussing issues related to line-based "blame" annotation granularity:
"Cregit-Linux: how code gets into the kernel": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43451654
Of course, in your situation I guess such a tool would only help if other people use it. :D
Git log gives the author (et al) given a commit.
Git blame gives the commit given the line and file.
Worth noting that annotate and praise were added to address the semantics, regardless of whether they were the original intent or not
e.g., you realize that something broke A/B test logic on Friday. Sure, there are Jira tickets, but that's slow and annoying to dig through. There are commit messages, but things get squashed, etc. Plus, if you work in a monorepo with about 60 PRs a day, it's hard to know if it was your code or an associated library someone touched.
That's exactly when git bisect helps. It quickly narrows down which commit introduced the bug when you don't know where to start looking. Once bisect identifies the problematic commit, you can then use git blame (if needed) to see who made those specific changes.
Edit: Cleaned up what I was saying to hopefully avoid confusion.
If you want to know which commit actually caused a problem you would use bisect. That may be what you're saying, but it sounded a bit like you are saying blame is better for tracking the culprit commit.