Source changes should include date of change

[rikki cattermole]

On 09/09/2018 5:43 PM, Paul Backus wrote:
> 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*".

Or Mercurial, SVN, CVS... we are not using mainframes anymore. We can 
afford the cost of a full blown database with all this extra information 
in it as well as all the past changes. Anyways, we're no longer talking 
hundreds of lines of code. We talk in millions of lines of code where 
comments just don't scale to.