[pjc50]

At my last workplace, the codebase was about 25 years old, there were three of us, and one of us was the original author. You could simply guess "Gerald wrote this" and you'd be right nine times out of ten. However, it turns out that software developers have finite memory themselves, and svn blame was useful in tracing a line of code back to the original ticket.

Linking a line of code back to the commit is useful even if you can't ask the author about it. It tells you what other lines of code are involved and what the overall purpose is. It's significantly more useful if you can link it into documentation outside the code: ticketing systems, requirements docs, etc.

The main limit to svn blame in that situation was that quite often it would hit commit 1, when the codebase had been imported from Visual SourceSafe.