Ask HN: Do you ever truly use your revision history?
Source control gives you a full history of every change that's ever been made to your codebase since its beginning. At my current company they place a huge value on that history, so much so that they haven't transitioned from SVN to git solely because of the logistical challenge of migrating 30 years of commits. Obviously the write-only paradigm is useful when reconciling changes with others and when reverting recent, broken changes or recovering accidentally-deleted work. But to me, it seems like there's diminishing value the further back you go. I can't imagine getting much value from trawling through two-year-old commits, much less twenty-year-old commits. So I ask: at your company and in your experience, do you get value from source-control-arachaeology? And if so, what does that look like in your case? 3 comments on Hacker News.
Source control gives you a full history of every change that's ever been made to your codebase since its beginning. At my current company they place a huge value on that history, so much so that they haven't transitioned from SVN to git solely because of the logistical challenge of migrating 30 years of commits. Obviously the write-only paradigm is useful when reconciling changes with others and when reverting recent, broken changes or recovering accidentally-deleted work. But to me, it seems like there's diminishing value the further back you go. I can't imagine getting much value from trawling through two-year-old commits, much less twenty-year-old commits. So I ask: at your company and in your experience, do you get value from source-control-arachaeology? And if so, what does that look like in your case?
Source control gives you a full history of every change that's ever been made to your codebase since its beginning. At my current company they place a huge value on that history, so much so that they haven't transitioned from SVN to git solely because of the logistical challenge of migrating 30 years of commits. Obviously the write-only paradigm is useful when reconciling changes with others and when reverting recent, broken changes or recovering accidentally-deleted work. But to me, it seems like there's diminishing value the further back you go. I can't imagine getting much value from trawling through two-year-old commits, much less twenty-year-old commits. So I ask: at your company and in your experience, do you get value from source-control-arachaeology? And if so, what does that look like in your case? 3 comments on Hacker News.
Source control gives you a full history of every change that's ever been made to your codebase since its beginning. At my current company they place a huge value on that history, so much so that they haven't transitioned from SVN to git solely because of the logistical challenge of migrating 30 years of commits. Obviously the write-only paradigm is useful when reconciling changes with others and when reverting recent, broken changes or recovering accidentally-deleted work. But to me, it seems like there's diminishing value the further back you go. I can't imagine getting much value from trawling through two-year-old commits, much less twenty-year-old commits. So I ask: at your company and in your experience, do you get value from source-control-arachaeology? And if so, what does that look like in your case?
Hacker News story: Ask HN: Do you ever truly use your revision history?
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Reviewed by Tha Kur
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March 07, 2020
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