Re: Using VC for change descriptions

[Joseph Myers]

On Mon, 29 Jan 2018, Richard Stallman wrote:

>   > If the average number of times a list of entities is needed is much 
>   > smaller than 1 per commit (and I suspect it's much smaller, for the 
>   > projects I work on), it makes more sense for the reader to construct it 
> if 
>   > needed rather than for the writer to construct such lists that will 
>   > probably never be needed.
> 
> The "reader", someone who wants to use that data, would have to
> reconstruct it for all the changes in the history of the given source
> file.  Each time someone wants to investigate that source file, person
> would have to do that again.  This means generating by hand the entities
> changed for each change in that file.

But I don't think the reader, using git, would be looking for lists of 
entities like that.  Rather, they'd use e.g. "git blame" to see at once 
what commit was responsible for every line in the current source file (and 
possibly "git blame", specifying a past revision, if they want to see the 
previous changes to lines where the most recent commit isn't interesting).

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
address@hidden