[timhh]

In my experience it's better to just bite the bullet and do it. Eventually you will do it, so you either screw up git blame for a small codebase with a small amount of history, or wait until it is a large codebase with a large amount of history to screw up.

> It would be nice if there was a kind of diffing algorithm that can diff code units syntactically across history.

There have been quite a few attempts at that though I've only seen them applied to resolving merge conflicts. It would be interesting to try them for blame too.