Subject: Re: bug#40725: 27.0.91; Tutorial reports false positive key rebindings

From: Richard Stallman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 26 Apr 2020 22:18:21 -0400

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
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It is too bad that the option of renaming the file's whole history in
the repo has been lost.  It has been useful.  I disagree with the idea
that there is anything wrong about doing so.

The change history is not meant as evidence for a court case.  It is a
log of past changes to the code, to help us understand how to change
it in the future.  What happened in the past is not a crucial question
in its own right; rather, it matters because it can help answer
questions such as why something fails now and how to change it.

If a source file (let's say, flles.el) had a different name in the
past, that makes little difference to maintaining the code in that
file, as long as the renaming didn't change when and where the file is
loaded.  So it would be a significant help, and little loss, to put
all the records for that file's code under the name "files.el",
including records from when the file had another name.  This is not a
kind of tampering.  It is filing the info under the name where we
would look for it.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)