Blame improvements - line range; deleted lines [was: svn commit: r1491445 ...]

Markus Schaber wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 01:38:48PM -0000, danielsh_at_apache.org wrote:
>> It would have been easy to find what revision removed the line break if we
>> had a reverse blame --- that is, a blame that walks the chain of diffs from
>> newerto older, rather than from older to newer.
>
> +1
>
>> While we're talking about blame improvements, another one is blame a line
>> range: stop as soon as every line in a given [X, Y] range is accounted for
>> (use-case: svn blame | grep -5 '/line I am looking at/').  Bert says that
>> stop as soon as "at least one" line in a given range would be useful for
>> him (use-case: "which revision last changed [this function definition]?")
>> and suggests that API users would find a callback that allows them to decide
>> when to stop gathering further blame information.
>
> Agreed.
>
> May be this way also allows to do queries for deleted lines by making the
> callback stop when he finds a deleted line in a given range.

I have thought before that it would sometimes be useful to include blame information on the gaps between lines.  For each gap between adjacent lines (and before the first and after the last line), there is a revision in which any text between these two lines was deleted.

Example: blame -r1:30 foo.c_at_30 could produce these (revnum | line-text) pairs:
  r20 | "int main()"
  r20 | "{"
  r25 | NULL
  r30 | "    return 0;"
  r20 | "}"

where NULL means some line(s) were at this position in r24 but nothing was here in r25 up to the revision being blamed.

- Julian
Received on 2013-06-12 14:26:31 CEST