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Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

> It's surprisingly useful; I share it with my coworkers and we often consult it if we notice something has been behaving differently starting at a certain date to see what was going on then.

Don't you have commit logs for this??

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Not for everything, but things that I do have commit logs for it's a needle in a haystack problem of which repo the commit logs would be in. At work we have ~120 repos, at least a dozen of which I'm likely to have been in over a couple weeks. Other things are likely a ticket rather than a commit (running OS updates, switching to a new haproxy might be a commit from days or weeks earlier when done in staging but the commit log wouldn't show when it was activated in production).

It's very powerful having just a few sentences I can read about what was going on specifically on a given day.

I think git keeps a per-branch history but in practice I have never seen it used

Commit logs are isolated and per repository. In large organizations, you're usually working with numerous services, often with different owners and split across a number of repositories. Figuring out what caused something to happen can be a fairly complicated process, especially when you don't know exactly where to start digging. Having an overview like this can be invaluable and save you a lot of time.

Commit logs typically only show the coding part, not everything else. It can also be spread out over several repos, or lost if branches are deleted.

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