'git blame' is named after the subversion and CVS blame features that do the same thing. Subversion docs are clear that it's a snarky name and that 'svn praise' and 'svn annotate' are neutral synonyms.
Perhaps someone familiar with CVS can comment on its history there since it seems to be the first source control to add it.
EDIT: and one of the main reasons it's a useful feature is it tells you who to talk to to understand a piece of code, or to coordinate a roll back, or to do any other sort of communication. It probably matters more in a big company where code is changing frequently and you're unlikely to know everyone and what they're working on.
> Subversion docs are clear that it's a snarky name and that 'svn praise' and 'svn annotate' are neutral synonyms.
A few years ago, some Atlassian developer changed "Blame" in the BitBucket UI to "Annotate". I remember a lot of people being frustrated because they couldn't find "blame" anywhere and the change was never officially announced. It just happened one day
Someone opened a ticket with BitBucket about it which ended up drawing a lot of attention from frustrated users who couldn't find "blame", and their searches for it on Google led people to the ticket. Atlassian eventually responded saying that they made the change because "blame" sounds bad and can hurt people's feelings somehow (with no examples given of course, though ironically the dev who made the change certainly had hurt feelings after the upset masses had some choice words for the short-sighted decision. Though Atlassian doubled down and I believe closed the ticket without reverting the change, so the confusion remains, as far as I know)
I don't think that they ever mentioned the Subversion/CVS parallel that was drawn to choose that name, so it was really confusing why that was selected. But this comment shed some light on that ancient incident
If I ever saw an "annotate" command I'd immediately assume it's for adding notes as metadata outside the actual software versioning tool, not for seeing who wrote the code in question.
Nomenclature matters. Do not reinvent terms just for fun.
Agreed - I don't understand at all how the word "annotate" is being used here. It seems like "substitute" would be a better standin - as in "To whom can I attribute this code?"
I'm not in disagreement about being able to tell who wrote some piece of code, I like gitlens in my vscode for ex.
The feelings hurt thing is real, unfortunately for myself I am that person that gets butthurt but it's a phrasing thing, "why did you do this?" vs. something more neutral sounding like "hey this has this side effect are you aware".
Anyway unfortunately in my case too we're not allowed to write tests so it really is an exercise in omniscience.
I'm curious if you have experienced people asking something as blunt and short-sighted as "why did you do this?" as the result of a blame. The blame should reveareveal the PR or commit that a change came from which should answer that question already
You should also write tests. They ensure that your code works as intended. Some teammates might not understand that untested code can cause more development time since broken features will have to be fixed in production, so highlighting bugs that have to be fixed as well as writing tests thst cover as many cases as possible should shine some light for those still not understanding their value
That's the thing, I used to think tests are annoying but now I'm advocating for em, maybe a sign of growing up ha. Unfortunately not my call. Yeah it's just tone, tone changes the outcome of some conversation. Puts person on defensive, stops thinking, that kind of thing.
I mean, I get it. Priorities can also affect things. I'm in a similar situation at work where the manager is pushing to get a project out as fast as possible at the expense of testing and even basic planning. It's only serving to make things much worse because all of the short sighted decisions are causing all kinds of new problems that could have been avoided entirely
Sometimes it's easier to adopt better practices when moving to another team or project altogether
Yes, the history of the name is as you write. But the value of the command lies in finding the commits, and, especially, in finding which lines changed together.
> EDIT: and one of the main reasons it's a useful feature is it tells you who to talk to to understand a piece of code, or to coordinate a roll back, or to do any other sort of communication. It probably matters more in a big company where code is changing frequently and you're unlikely to know everyone and what they're working on.
It's actually a pretty awful feature because it misses so much context. I've been blamed before for changes which were technically my fault, but while my code was to spec, some unrelated part of the code I was interacting with was not (iirc it was some multi-threaded nonsense like a race condition or something).
It was a super-stressful week of constantly having to defend my design decisions and white-boarding my thought process (think of the "am I taking crazy pills?!?" scene in Zoolander) as my senior coworker tried to gaslight and throw me under the bus.
Maybe I've had a uniquely bad experience with it, but I've vowed to never use it (as a way to attribute `blame`). Code should be holistically understood and it's your job as a technical leader to know how the parts move, resolve issues without drama, and make sure your whole team is on the same page: this is a cohesive team, not an adversarial dick-measuring contest.
Just know that it can also be used in very positive ways.
For instance, I may want to change some basic behavior. Easy enough, spend some time implementing and testing, and then run into a downstream consequence of that change while implementing. Now I need to make a decision. Reviewing the history of the relevant sections of code, using git blame, can help me uncover the context and ways in which the code I'm puzzling about changing has changed previously. This can be incredibly valuable and speed up or even obviate an amount of discussion around the potential change.
This is why blameless post-mortems and a healthy culture are important. I'm sorry you encountered such a hostile culture. Perhaps "git blame" has the wrong name, but the idea of traceability is still important.
Aviation is the shining example of this, combining high traceability (you should be able to track each part back to the factory and to all the technicians who have worked on it) with accident inquiries that are focused around finding cause and avoiding future risks rather than assigning blame.
I acknowledge that I have no idea what happened in this situation. Please don't take this as me justifying mean behavior.
> Code should be holistically understood and it's your job as a technical leader to know how the parts move
That's true when we design something. Once the design is done, and is broken, we have to tear it back apart to understand WHAT is broken. That's when blame is useful.
I love using git blame. I love it even more when it comes back with something I made, because then I get to learn. When something I thought was safe turned out to break something, that's an invaluable chance to understand the system better.
That being said, I've totally used the blame output to end a series of excuses from a junior about how "his code was definitely right, but everything else was garbage" because I really do not care. If it worked before, but doesn't work now, that's a problem. Part of the modern process of "fail fast" is also to build up taste about which parts of a working system are spooky.
I find that some people take the "blameless" culture too far, and use it as an excuse not to reflect on outcomes. They just ruffle the code whenever there's a big, and don't think critically about why that bug appeared. What that tells us about the system we're making.
I work at a company with a mess of a monorepo but the git history is a gold mine. It's fascinating digging back into history and reading why certain decisions are made, or random pitfalls the author discovered, or context that was missing. It absolutely feels like a bit of a detective mystery trying to dig back and figure out if some line of code is a bug that was meant to do something else, or is functioning as intended and the requirements changed, or something else entirely.
Ofc as my org has gotten bigger, we've lost a lot of the discipline around writing good commit messages so now it's just a mess of large code-changes with 1-line "bugfix" explainations :(
> Ofc as my org has gotten bigger, we've lost a lot of the discipline around writing good commit messages so now it's just a mess of large code-changes with 1-line "bugfix" explainations :(
I have a battle at the moment to try and get the team I am in (5 devs) to take their git commit messages and history seriously, but the "TL" has said that he "doesn't care that much about commits/history/etc"
That bit us right on the ass when debugging someone elses branch recently, because the state needed to fix was across three seemingly unconnected commits, so a checkout of one commit + fix then needed to be tested across two other commits.
Isn't this sort of an inconsequential point? The commit still has one and only one author and that's almost certainly what I'm looking for so I know who to go ask questions about their code. I also use it to find the commit but less frequently.
And the committer and author don’t even need to be the same!
But the point, as I read it, is: what matters is the context, i.e. if a line is faulty, how did things look like when it wasn’t faulty? The commit’s content is more often more important than the committer, although the committer is useful because you can ask them if they’re still around.
At my last workplace, the codebase was about 25 years old, there were three of us, and one of us was the original author. You could simply guess "Gerald wrote this" and you'd be right nine times out of ten. However, it turns out that software developers have finite memory themselves, and svn blame was useful in tracing a line of code back to the original ticket.
Linking a line of code back to the commit is useful even if you can't ask the author about it. It tells you what other lines of code are involved and what the overall purpose is. It's significantly more useful if you can link it into documentation outside the code: ticketing systems, requirements docs, etc.
The main limit to svn blame in that situation was that quite often it would hit commit 1, when the codebase had been imported from Visual SourceSafe.
On a small team I usually already know who wrote the code I'm reading, but it's nice to see if a block of code is all from the same point in time, or if some of the lines are the result of later bugfixing. It's also useful to find the associated pull request for a block of code, to see what issues were considered in code review, to know whether something that seems odd was discussed or glossed over when the code was merged in the first place.
I find the GitHub blame view indispensable for this kind of code archeology, as they also give you an easy way to traverse the history of lines of code. In blame, you can go back to the previous revision that changed the line and see the blame for that, and on and on.
I really want to find or build a tool that can automatically traverse history this way, like git-evolve-log.
I've been carrying around a copy of "git blameall" for years - looks like https://github.com/gnddev/git-blameall is the same one - that basically does this, but keeps it all interleaved in one output (which works pretty well for archeology, especially if you're looking at "work hardened" code.)
(Work hardening is a metalworking term where metal bent back and forth (or hammered) too much becomes brittle; an analogous effect shows up in code, where a piece of code that has been bugfixed a couple of times will probably be need more fixes; there was a published result a decade or so back about using this to focus QA efforts...)
"Cregit" tool might be of interest to you, it generates token-based (rather than line-based) git "blame" annotation views: https://github.com/cregit/cregit
I learned of Cregit recently--just submitted it to HN after seeing multiple recent HN comments discussing issues related to line-based "blame" annotation granularity:
No, if your commits are meaningful and have plenty of context, like they should, then you are not looking for the author. Instead, you are looking for "why is this here", and the commit should tell you.
I mean, no. If you work on a codebase that's been going for more than a few years, the author likely doesn't even work there anymore. The commit is the important thing.
Frankly the commit message is usually the important thing. I care about why a change happened. Give me a Jira ticket, or a line of reasoning, or some documentation. I need to know this far more often than I care who literally typed the code in the computer.
Unless you get lazy like me and start committing only out of shame once the modified file count reaches close to triple digits or prior to doing very sketchy changes.
Persistently. My solo projects aren't particularly complex though so I haven't really wasted any time by not being able to use git history for debugging. I currently have 38 files modified on my solo work project. If I'm in a team I keep it somewhat tidy but solo I only treat commits as manual save points I use only when my spidey senses tingle or when I'm about to refactor something that works fine as it is. Also when I'm done with a large part of the SW so the next dev at least has some rough timeline for what got added when and how many times it was majorly iterated. It's not a good habit but it has yet to bite me in the ass so I learn.
Edit: A large part of the reason now that I think about it is that I don't work off real tickets but just bugs I notice or things that get mentioned on the current solo work project. In a team I can just dissect the ticket and am forced to do only that ticket on the branch whereas solo I'm just jumping all over the place. Sometimes I'll do thing X partway, start considering options and in the meantime do thing Y so it's a mess but the tasks get done so.. For context the project is 1 year old developed from 0 by me. Essentially an internal log parsing and analysis tool for a couple formats. Nothing particularly complex.
Perhaps the author intended further additions, perhaps transforming the output to apply filters or add spurious superlatives for humour value (“Great work on line 420, User6942!”).
BTW, one of the more frustrating things about "git blame" comes about when cleaning up an old codebase: In my current job I had to move a lot of files, combine repos, reformat code, ect, ect.
"git blame" and similar tools often always show my name, even though I didn't write the code.
Most places I worked have a blame.ignoreRevsFile[0] somewhere on the top level to inhibit this. It's a bit awkward because first you need to commit, then you need commit again to update the commit hash in the ignore revs file, but it's great for filtering out pure refactor churn.
"Cregit" tool might be of interest to you, it generates token-based (rather than line-based) git "blame" annotation views: https://github.com/cregit/cregit
I learned of Cregit recently--just submitted it to HN after seeing multiple recent HN comments discussing issues related to line-based "blame" annotation granularity:
I was thinking that I would really like a tool that shows the history of bad code, and who actually wrote it and amended it, not just who last changed it.
Particularly so if I can see that someone wrote bad code, so I can review the rest of their code.
git log/blame have -C and -M to follow modified lines across files. Unlike other version control, you don't have to have used a special command to rename files, because it doesn't track files that way in the first place. The maximum -C can even look for sources in other commits.
Bisect shows which commit is responsible for a yes/no behavior change. Blame shows which commit is responsible for a line of code. Both are useful for finding the responsible commit but for different things.
Sometimes you don't know which commit actually caused the problem.
e.g., you realize that something broke A/B test logic on Friday. Sure, there are Jira tickets, but that's slow and annoying to dig through. There are commit messages, but things get squashed, etc. Plus, if you work in a monorepo with about 60 PRs a day, it's hard to know if it was your code or an associated library someone touched.
That's exactly when git bisect helps. It quickly narrows down which commit introduced the bug when you don't know where to start looking. Once bisect identifies the problematic commit, you can then use git blame (if needed) to see who made those specific changes.
Edit: Cleaned up what I was saying to hopefully avoid confusion.
I'm not quite sure what you're saying, but blame just tells you the last person and commit to change a line.
If you want to know which commit actually caused a problem you would use bisect. That may be what you're saying, but it sounded a bit like you are saying blame is better for tracking the culprit commit.
