Duncan Murdoch <murdoch@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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Received on Mon Feb 6 19:50:13 2006