Preserving metadata for blame/praise through whitespace changes

Michael B. Trausch mbt at zest.trausch.us
Mon Jul 6 18:43:23 BST 2009


Hello,

Alright, so I realize that this isn't really an issue of a VCS, since *all* 
VCSes that I am aware of do this:  When you go through en masse and do a 
formatting change, such as correcting indentation, you lose the utility of the 
blame/praise functionality.

For example, I just fixed the indentation in the AllTray source code 
repository (Vala-mode in Emacs didn't work the way I thought and I could not 
figure it out at first, so I had quite a lot of history "wrongly" indented). 
I fixed that, but now the files are all largely the last commit, by me.  I can 
"bzr blame -r-2" to see the real information, but that isn't terribly useful 
until more history is present since the indentation change.

So, I have two questions:

  1. Is there something I should have done that would have preserved "blame" 
data?
  2. If there is nothing, is there some way to educate bzr that whitespace-only 
changes should not factor in to things like diffs and output of commands like 
"bzr blame", or perhaps, be able to be removed from consideration by the 
addition of an extra parameter?

 	Thanks,
 	Mike



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