[Gnu-arch-users] Re: release goals for Bazaar 1.1

[Stefan Monnier]

> Maybe it is because I never want to know _who_ wrote the code when I run
> "cvs annotate" (I know the people working on this file or this function),
> but _why_ and _when_ they wrote this code. [cvs misses --summary option.]

> It is very possible that my use cases are different from yours. Are they?

It may be.  I also never care to "blame".  Actually I don't even want to
"annotate" either.  I don't really want the output that "cvs annotate" gives
me, what I want instead is to trace the live of a piece of code.

I.e. from a set of code lines, I want to see all the diff+log that resulted
in those lines.  Also, often enough the diff+log is not what I want because
it just corresponds to a re-indent or a move, so I often also want to see
the parents of those diffs (i.e. the diff+log that resulted in the text that
was then changed by those diffs), their parents's parents, ...
until I really find the diff+log where the code was originally added.

With CVS I typically do this manually: `cvs annotate' to find the relevant
revision, then `cvs diff' to get the corresponding diff and `cvs log' to see
the corresponding message.  Then if the diff is just moving the thing
around, I go back to `cvs annotate' the preceding revision, ...
It's all very inefficient for me.

In Arch it'll be even worse because the data structure we have is not a good
match to "tla annotate".  I really wish someone will write "tla trace-code"
instead of writing yet-another "tla annotate".


        Stefan