Re: git history tracking across renames (and emacs support) (Was: The name gnus-cloud.el)

[Paul Eggert]

Richard Stallman wrote:
> Was the whole history of our repository lost at that time ???

Not at all. It's still there.

As part of maintenance I've done quite a bit of spelunking through the history 
of Emacs and other GNU programs, and the problem of following renames is small 
potatoes compared to the issues that normally consume most of my 
software-archaeology time: namely, figuring out *why* a change was made, not the 
mechanical details of what changed.

What would be most helpful (and I realize I'm asking for a lot) would be 
ChangeLog entries or commit messages (it doesn't matter which) that explain the 
*motivation* for each change. In contrast, often it is counterproductive to 
burden commit messages with mechanical details such as naming each and every 
function that was modified, as it wastes developers' time to wade through these 
details when they're trying to look for stuff that's more important.