Source changes should include date of change

[Paul Backus]

On Sunday, 9 September 2018 at 04:37:48 UTC, Josphe Brigmo wrote:
> If git would automatically do the dates then one could download 
> the source code. Git would be the central repository and if one 
> wanted an offline version that had enough info in it such as 
> the data a change was made, who changed it, the date the file 
> was generated etc, then it would be better than having nothing.
>
> [...]
>
> The thing is, none of this shit hurts anything. Comments don't 
> change programs so really it is just an issue about bloat and 
> rot. The rot is covered by git hub automatically generating all 
> the info(then it becomes no different than the problem of 
> versioning with everything, want an update, just download it 
> from git). The bloat is minimum and the bloat is precisely 
> valid information(it's not like it is gibberish).

I think perhaps you are laboring under a severe misunderstanding 
of what git is, and how git and Github actually work.

Git is a version control system. It records historical snapshots 
("commits") of a project, along with metadata like date and 
author, and lets you navigate between different versions. The 
collection of data and metadata saved by git for a particular 
project is called a "git repository".

Github is a website for hosting git repositories. When you 
download the dmd source code from Github using `git clone`, you 
receive a complete copy of the entire history of dmd, including 
both the commits themselves and the metadata associated with them.

That's why there's no need to add comments--all the data you want 
is already there, not just on Github, but in *every single* 
offline copy. When we say "just use git," we don't mean "use 
Github, the website," we mean "use git, the version control 
system, to view the historical information *in your local copy*".