Subject: Re: bug#55871: Acknowledgement (27.1; vc-git.el log view 'a', 'f', 'd' do not work when following renames)

From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2022 03:23:29 +0200

Dear Nicolas,

On 12/12/2022 18:44, Nicolás Ojeda Bär wrote:

> Apologies for the delay in getting back to you; I have been submerged
> in my day job and haven't had any time to look at the code again (the
> copyright assignment is done, by the way).

Good to hear about the copyright assignment.

No problem about delayed replies, I first of all wanted to experiment 
with an alternative and see how others deal with it.

> I read your message, and I think immitating GitHub's UI is a great
> idea, as it liberates us from having to do any kind of "pretreatment"
> of the git log (which can be expensive for large repos).

Indeed. I suppose we'll lose out in some more complex cases (e.g. if 
--follow tracks copies, it might track the cases when several files had 
been copied into one, including when that action spanned several 
commits; and thus --follow could show the history of each such file), 
but we should win in the most common cases (single-file copies and 
renames) OOtB, which we don't have any good support for still.

> We should focus in this direction to fix this issue. If I get some
> spare time over the holidays I will try to take a look (sadly, I
> cannot promise that will be the case...).

We won't be able to put the improvement into Emacs 29 anyway (the 
release branch has been cut, it's now bugfix-only), so there is no hurry.

Let's see who gets to this first. If you wanted to finish up your patch 
instead, I'm not going to say no either. But GitHub's approach seems 
like it should require less (and less complex) code.

Best,
Dmitry.