[darrenf]

> The feature has a terrible name

But in svn the feature is actually called "annotate"; "blame" and "praise" are mere aliases for it. To quote the book[0]:

    you may find yourself typing svn blame …
    or svn praise … instead of using the canonical
    svn annotate command form. That's okay—the
    Subversion developers anticipated as much,
    so those particular command aliases work, too!

[0] http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.tour.history.html#svn...

[cornholio]

An interesting case of Poe's law, applied to command lines: an alias made in jest becomes so successful that users are actually using it for the ridiculed purpose fully believing it's the intended use.

[gmueckl]

Without looking at the archives, I believe that annotate and praise were introduced well after the initial implementation which used blame as the command. I may be wrong, though.

[darrenf]

It seems the command is listed as `blame` even in the v1.0 book, but does even then have the `annotate` and `praise` aliases. In all the years I used svn I firmly believed annotate was the canonical form and it was the one I always used, so I've learnt something here (about svn, and maybe about myself).

[Arkanosis]

Indeed, both were added in late 2003: - annotate: http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/subversion/trunk/subversion/svn... - praise: http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/subversion/trunk/subversion/svn...