Re: Git log can not show history before rename

On Fri, 30 Jan 2009, Linus Torvalds wrote:

If somebody wants to do a more intelligent --follow, I can only applaud, 
but I'm personally not likely to look into it.

Side note: you can probably get a _limited_ form of parent rewriting on 
top of --follow by adding some more hacks. IOW, I think you can make 
--parents --follow work better in practice even with the hacky thing by 
adding some more hacks on top. But you'll never get the _true_ answer (ie 
get things right across renames in different branches) without totally 
ripping out the current --follow logic.

Interestingly, I suspect that doing --follow "right" is really quite 
complicated, but one sign of doing it right would be to allow multiple 
files to be tracked at the same time.

Because in a "correct" implementation of --follow you'd literally have to 
attach different filenames to different commits (rather than have one 
global filename that you follow and then switch for everybody when you see 
a rename), and also have the ability to track multiple files per commit 
when you reach the same commit under two filenames.

I really never wanted the pain, and never cared enough for it, which is 
why --follow is such a hack. It literally was designed as a "SVN noob" 
pleaser, not as a "real git functionality" thing. The idea was that you'd 
get away from the (broken) mindset of thinking that renames matter in the 
big picture.

			Linus