Carl Eastlund wrote at 06/18/2013 01:36 PM:
<rant>I don't understand why version control systems don't take directories and renames more seriously, because this stuff is part of the development cycle and should be recorded like any other change.</rant>
This doesn't help, but... I think the reason is that it's hard to do, so most SCM systems haven't even tried. It's very common for a rename to be a delete-plus-add in the model. Or, in an RCS/SCCS/etc.-backed system like CVS, for someone to simply rename the files in the repository server's filesystem and break any branches that did not want those files renamed.
Perhaps the most sophisticated SCM I've used, Atria ClearCase (a descendant of Apollo DSEE) in the early-mid 1990s, had a much more sophisticated model than the others, and, IIRC, even did fancy things like monitoring filesystem operations(?), but it cost a lot of money and required a lot of sys-admin.
Git's free-ness and popularity makes it the obvious choice to use nowadays, but in my limited experience with it, Git seems to have a lot of evolution of "let's add on yet another somewhat different concept to our numerous existing concepts that originally built upon some scripts that Linus found useful for managing kernel patches", rather than nailing a clean and sufficient model from the start. This is a source of frustration to those of us who have used a dozen other SCM systems and recall basic things being easier to do in the past.
Neil V. _________________________ Racket Developers list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/dev
