GNU bug report logs - #40725
27.0.91; Tutorial reports false positive key rebindings

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From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
To: rms <at> gnu.org
Cc: contovob <at> tcd.ie, mattiase <at> acm.org, 40725 <at> debbugs.gnu.org, juri <at> linkov.net
Subject: bug#40725: 27.0.91; Tutorial reports false positive key rebindings
Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2020 09:20:54 +0300

> From: Richard Stallman <rms <at> gnu.org>
> Cc: mattiase <at> acm.org, contovob <at> tcd.ie, 40725 <at> debbugs.gnu.org,
> 	juri <at> linkov.net
> Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2020 23:33:22 -0400
> 
>   > > You are making a mountain out of a molehill.
> 
>   > It isn't a molehill for me.  I need to search VCS history quite a lot.
> 
> If we rename a file, can't we rename its master file too, so that the
> history before the rename is include in what you search?

With Git (and most modern VCS) there's no master file, as there were
with RCS and CVS.  Changes are tracked on the entire tree level, and
stored as binary blobs in a special subdirectory (under the .git
directory in the case of Git).  I don't think it's possible to "edit"
those blobs post-mortem to do the equivalent of the renaming you
mention, but even if it were possible, it's a bad idea, because of at
least 2 reasons: (a) it changes history, i.e. pretends that this file
was always called by that new name; and (b) in modern VCS systems each
commit's changeset is hashed and its hash is stored, so changing even
one byte of that would cause the hash be incorrect, and the result
will be a corrupted repository, AFAIU.

So I think this kind of history rewriting is impossible, let alone not
a good idea.

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