Tracking files and file-level operations

[Philippe Lhoste]

On 20/07/2010 07:59, Chris Hecker wrote:
> I think it's pretty silly that bzr doesn't support copies, but I do agree with their
> rationale that renames are more important (at least in my experience), so I think it's
> slightly sillier that Hg doesn't support renames (it's one of the reasons I chose bzr over
> hg, I rename stuff all the time, but split more rarely, and hosing svn repeatedly with
> complex renames that are a walk in the park for bzr is what made me finally switch to a
> dvcs at all).

Indeed, rename is more frequent that split, but still I often split files and then regret 
there is no support for this in the history.
It depends on programmer's workflow, but (depending on language), I often add stuff to a 
file until it works, then I step back and starts splitting the file to get cleaner 
separation of tasks, etc. I tend to do complex code first, then refactor it until it looks 
readable and elegant...

At work, due to legacy changes, we often have monster Java classes over 50KB (of source!) 
and some even weight over 200KB... Splitting these classes looks like a good idea (often 
pushed back because of fear of breaking stuff and lack of time, but that's another story).
We don't use Bazaar but I just wanted to expose a probably common use case.

 > It's slightly unbelievable that none of git/bzr/hg/svn support both as first class
 > operations.

I know next to nothing with Git, but from threads in this mailing list, I thought it was 
able to track file fragments or something.

-- 
Philippe Lhoste
--  (near) Paris -- France
--  http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
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