History of a line?

[Duncan Murdoch <mu...@stats.uwo.ca>]

Is there a relatively easy way to get the history of a particular line 
(or small group of lines) of source?  That is, what I'd like to see is 
the information that would be in the log for that file, but filtered so 
that only changes affecting particular lines are shown; it be nice to 
see the diffs for each of the modifications, but only those that affect 
the section of interest.

The use is this:  I'm trying to fix a bug in some obscure code in a 
project I'm working on.  I'm hoping the history of that section of code 
will throw some light on what the intentions were.

I can use svn blame to find when the section of code was last modified, 
then use it again for the modification before that, etc., but it's 
really tedious, and I have to separately look at the log to see the 
commit messages for those changes.  (So far I've tracked backwards 
through about 5 modifications over 6 years, all of which look like they 
were incidental formatting changes.  I suspect the commit messages 
aren't going to help me with this one, but I've wanted to do this 
before; this is just a particularly aggravating instance of it.)

Duncan Murdoch


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Re: History of a line?

[Duncan Murdoch <mu...@stats.uwo.ca>]

On 2/6/2006 12:06 PM, kfogel@collab.net wrote:
> Duncan Murdoch <mu...@stats.uwo.ca> writes:
>> Is there a relatively easy way to get the history of a particular line
>> (or small group of lines) of source?  That is, what I'd like to see is
>> the information that would be in the log for that file, but filtered
>> so that only changes affecting particular lines are shown; it be nice
>> to see the diffs for each of the modifications, but only those that
>> affect the section of interest.
>>
>> The use is this:  I'm trying to fix a bug in some obscure code in a
>> project I'm working on.  I'm hoping the history of that section of
>> code will throw some light on what the intentions were.
>>
>> I can use svn blame to find when the section of code was last
>> modified, then use it again for the modification before that, etc.,
>> but it's really tedious, and I have to separately look at the log to
>> see the commit messages for those changes.  (So far I've tracked
>> backwards through about 5 modifications over 6 years, all of which
>> look like they were incidental formatting changes.  I suspect the
>> commit messages aren't going to help me with this one, but I've wanted
>> to do this before; this is just a particularly aggravating instance of
>> it.)
> 
> There's no easy way to do this in Subversion.  The question itself is
> complex: to a human it's obvious what is "the same line" at different
> points in its history.  But when you try to think about it computably,
> it becomes dicey :-).
> 
> If you wrote a wrapper around 'svn blame' to do this, I think many
> people would be interested.

Thanks for the response.  As you say, it's not trivial, and I probably 
won't be able to tackle it.  But if someone else does, I'd be happy to 
test it out :-).

Duncan Murdoch

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Re: History of a line?

[kf...@collab.net]

Duncan Murdoch <mu...@stats.uwo.ca> writes:
> Is there a relatively easy way to get the history of a particular line
> (or small group of lines) of source?  That is, what I'd like to see is
> the information that would be in the log for that file, but filtered
> so that only changes affecting particular lines are shown; it be nice
> to see the diffs for each of the modifications, but only those that
> affect the section of interest.
> 
> The use is this:  I'm trying to fix a bug in some obscure code in a
> project I'm working on.  I'm hoping the history of that section of
> code will throw some light on what the intentions were.
> 
> I can use svn blame to find when the section of code was last
> modified, then use it again for the modification before that, etc.,
> but it's really tedious, and I have to separately look at the log to
> see the commit messages for those changes.  (So far I've tracked
> backwards through about 5 modifications over 6 years, all of which
> look like they were incidental formatting changes.  I suspect the
> commit messages aren't going to help me with this one, but I've wanted
> to do this before; this is just a particularly aggravating instance of
> it.)

There's no easy way to do this in Subversion.  The question itself is
complex: to a human it's obvious what is "the same line" at different
points in its history.  But when you try to think about it computably,
it becomes dicey :-).

If you wrote a wrapper around 'svn blame' to do this, I think many
people would be interested.

-Karl

-- 
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