Re: [idea] File history tracking hints

Hi Jeff,

On Sat, 30 Sep 2017, Jeff Hostetler wrote:

On 9/29/2017 7:12 PM, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

quoted

Therefore, it would be good to have a way to tell Git about renames
explicitly so that it does not even need to use its heuristics.

Agreed.

It would be nice if every file (and tree) had a permanent GUID
associated with it.  Then the filename/pathname becomes a property
of the GUIDs.  Then you can exactly know about moves/renames with
minimal effort (and no guessing).  But I suppose that ship has sailed...

Yes, that ship has sailed.

But we still could teach Git to understand certain "hints" (that would be
really more like "cluebats").

So while we cannot have any GUIDs that are persistent across renames/moves
(and which users would probably get wrong all the time by using
third-party tools that are not Git-rename aware), we have unique
identifiers: the object names.

And we could easily have a lookup table of pairs of object names, telling
Git that they were source and target of a rename. When Git would try to
figure out whether anything was renamed, it would first look at that
lookup table and save itself a lot of work (and opportunity to fail) and
short-cut the rename detection.

Ciao,
Johannes