[Skywalker13]

I don't understand why the git history has been pruned in this fork.

According to the first commit in this fork:

> Squashed as a single orphan commit — the original oven-sh/bun history isn't relevant to this stripped fork and its shallow clone doesn't push cleanly to a fresh remote.

IMHO it's always a bad decision to do that. Here, all commit authors are lost. The original history is always relevant.

[jeltz]

Yeah, and of they want to only keep history for the subset thet are interested in there is always git filter-branch.

[bjourne]

Yeah, this is one thing you should absolutely never, ever do as a responsible developer. It makes future debugging much more difficult (destroys git blame) and also is a huge dump on previous contributors who don't get credit for their work in the fork. If solenopsys is serious about the fork he should redo it. Throwing away history willy-nilly is such a giant red flag that I think he will have trouble attracting any contributors.

[andsoitis]

> in this fork

Not a fork, but a new project that takes a subset of the old Bun code to create something new, meant to complement Bun.

“Cruller is not intended to replace Bun for development. It is a minimal, specialized runtime for executing production code. In any case, I do not want to throw away such a large codebase that has taken several years to build. It makes more sense to turn it into a convenient embeddable library that can be used throughout the Zig ecosystem.”

[Aurornis]

That's a fork.

The git history should have been retained. It's helpful for the files that came over.

There is no good reason to erase all of the history. They should have deleted the files they didn't want to keep in a new commit.

[skeledrew]

A new project based primarily on existing code is still a fork. Also Ship of Theseus.

[otikik]

Wasn't the point of the Ship of Theseus precisely that establishing wether something is or isn't something else is at least complicated? Using it right after saying "X is still Y" kind of seems to make the opposite point.

[skeledrew]

The point here is that even though the water is murky about it's intrinsic identity, we know that it's still a particular ship with a particular back story, making at least it's extrinsic identity an immutable known. Fairly similar to how - most, if not all - complex living organisms continually gain and lose composing cells throughout their lives, yet their individual identities remain fixed: "I am X and this is my dog Y".

Similarly, a "fork" as we understand it in the context of software is this thing that, even though it's a modified copy, retains its extrinsic identity: "This software X was worked on in Y context, and is now being worked on in Z+ contexts". Same software, even if it gets a name change.

[giancarlostoro]

I hate that people git squash merges into dev, it always adds an extra layer of unnecessary ceremony when fixing your original branch, as opposed to just pulling the latest back into your original branch, then fixing the one line or whatever that was affected after merge, and now your git history is incompatible, so you have to delete your local branches because they're pointless now. Git squash should be done before your PR if you want to nuke dumb commits, but I prefer to have it all, if you want to find the key commits, tag them!

[gandreani]

This doesn't apply here in this case since this is a continuation of the Zig based bun and the newer bun versions use Rust.

There's no newer upstream changes to merge with the fork

[giancarlostoro]

Yeah, I'm okay with this particular case to some degree, since its a completely different project, I guess I'm frustrated that I keep seeing projects adopting git squash because some guy somewhere has really terrible commit messages.

[sevenzero]

How is the history relevant? Honest question. 5 years in the field I never had a reason to check out the git history of any project I ever worked on.

[flohofwoe]

You never run a git blame or git bisect to find out when and under which circumstances a regression or bug was introduced, and why this specific change was made? That might work for a while on a personal project, but is essential in a team project. It's not uncommon that by fixing a bug you also accidentially undo an actually intended change. Doing some software archeology in the git history and tracing back the steps that led to the bug/regression usually prevents that sort of thing. You'd also want to notify the person who introduced the bug (and if this is a good and honorable chap, they'll fix the bug themselves).

[simonw]

I look at history all the time.

Why is the code like this? Usually git blame will show me either a commit message with extra context or a link to an issue thread.

When was this bug first introduced? Git bisect can track it down almost automatically.

If you're never looking at history you're missing out on a lot of the value Git provides. It's more then just a backup tool.

[benrutter]

Simple but pretty common use case: If you're ever looking at some pre-existing code and thinking "I don't really get why it's written like this?", you can get a lot out of looking through the git blame/history.

Often "weird design" is there for historic reasons around stuff like backwards compatibility. If your project has a well managed commit log, you can find the notes of whoever implemented it, possibly even with their motivation for doing so.

At the very least, you can find out who wrote that code and ask them about it.

There's a tonne of data in git histories - this article was shared a few months back and is an awesome example of some things you can do with git history: https://piechowski.io/post/git-commands-before-reading-code/

[sevenzero]

That actually is helpful, but it would require a git history that actually makes sense. I rarely encounter well thought out git histories. For me its often just dev ramblings or 10 word commit messages

[fg137]

If I can choose "badly maintained history" and "no history" I'll choose the former every time. That's even less of a problem when Claude can do a first pass for you.

[sevenzero]

Claude can smd

[cpuguy83]

Bug is uncovered. Where was it first introduced? Why was the code changed? What did it do before the bug was introduced?

[sevenzero]

Why would that matter if a bug is uncovered? If you know there's a bug just fix it? Like what use does the bugs history have?

[afavour]

Because there will be a reason why the code was changed that introduced the bug. If you fix the bug you might inadvertently break a different piece of functionality.

A git commit gives you the reason for the change and the context of what other files were changed at the same time. I’ve found that invaluable.

[sevenzero]

Guess I must be doing something wrong to never have encountered this issue in my 5 years.

[cscheid]

I'm just going to answer this one candidly. Yes, you are doing something wrong. Immediately: the commit history is useful to understand the context in which a bug was introduced, because it's the best context to understand the _reason_ the mistake was maybe, which is a really good way to prevent regressions. But more generally: when an entire industry has arrived at an accepted practice, you the junior developer (sorry, 5 years is _nothing_: you need to be told this too) have a chance to pick up on it.

Have you heard "have you played guitar for 20 years, or have you played guitar 20 times for a year?" Time only helps with accumulating wisdom if you let it.

[vlovich123]

You can of course choose alternate strategies. It comes up a lot when doing low level systems programming because the bugs can be non-trivial to repro and root cause (particularly for C/C++ where you have segfaults and whatnot). So it’s cheaper and faster to try a bisect to find the regression introduction as an additional clue in the root cause analysis (eg ownership rules changed or there were changes that looked correct regarding threading but when you hyper focus on it you realize what the problem is). Or you’re working on a high performance codebase and there was a performance regression - it can be faster to bisect than it is to try to find the issue with profiling tools (I had this and seen issues where profiling tools would never have told you the issue).

[klibertp]

I would ignore it if I spotted it once. This is the second time, though, so I probably should point it out: 5 years is a very short time in terms of personal experience and development. While the whole industry moves very fast, it does so thanks to slow, grinding effort parallelized over hundreds of thousands of individuals. For an organization, 5 years is an era. For individuals, it's just 3-6 projects (+/- a few, depending on the context you work in).

TL;DR: "never have encountered in 5 years" is a meaningless data point.

My professional career can legally drink beer since a few years back, yet I'm still regularly hitting "first times" on various things in my day job; I'm also frequently mind-blown reading about others' experiences in domains I never touched. Don't make those "5 years" into a badge to hide behind; use it as a springboard to reach higher.

In this case, try to actively think of uses for the commit history. It's already there; there's an expectation (admittedly, to various degrees depending on context) that it will be maintained. Try to maximize the value you get out of it. Underutilizing a tool you have access to may not be that much of a problem on average, but in some specific circumstances can make a difference between being able to complete a task at all or not. You shouldn't rely on luck to never land in a situation like that: familiarizing yourself with as many potential uses for a tool as possible gives you a better chance of handling it more easily.

EDIT: formatting, last paragraph.

[VBprogrammer]

It depends on the size of the project (mostly in terms of number of active developers) and how close you are to the running code in production.

On a large project it's probably the first tool I reach for when we find something we have reason to believe was a recently introduced bug. Specifically annotating (git blame) the relevant code and scanning for what lines have been recently modified.

I've worked in startups where there were only 2 backend devs and a frontend guy. There it was almost completely irrelevant and I spent a couple of years at a large software shop, early in my career, where bugs in production code was mostly someone else's problem.

[loeg]

As you get better at engineering and grow into a senior, you'll find this more valuable.

[jeltz]

Probably, because in my 20 year career I have encountered it plenty except back the first couple of years as a junior developer when I did not know my tools and did not know that I should do this.

[ShinTakuya]

I'm tempted to suggest you have encountered the issue but your team mates are shielding you from the consequences (with or without their knowledge).

[afavour]

You do you. But in my twenty years I’ve leaned on it countless times.

[klibertp]

> A git commit [ideally] gives you the reason for the change

FTFY ;) I broadly agree, but it's important to note that, in practice, Git commits are hit and miss: they might save you a lot of time if they are well-structured and described properly, but they might also completely fail to give you anything of value (for the problem you're facing at the moment). Turning Git history into a broadly useful artifact requires a lot of discipline from everyone working on a codebase over its lifetime.

It's never totally useless, but it's often less helpful than it could be.

Recently, I turned to JJ for this exact reason: crafting a meaningful change history is much easier there, especially if you need to retrofit it after you're done with the implementation. jj's split, squash, and describe are a joy to work with, also because the interactive version lets you easily split or squash hunks (selected changes in the same file).

[afavour]

Fair. Though I find it works well when commits get squished at the PR level. That way you have a link to a (hopefully!) detailed overview of what happened, when and why.

[PennRobotics]

"Bug uncovered" doesn't mean "bug fixed."

Concrete example: yabridge is a tool to let Linux users run DAW plugins designed for Windows. Some changes to Wine (yabridge's main dependency) made yabridge stop working in 2024, and those Wine changes are not going to be undone as they advance progress on Wine's own bug list and test suite. When those changes were made, there wasn't a clear way to change the yabridge code to work with the modified Wine functions.

At the very least, if Wine and yabridge didn't keep a history of their code, you wouldn't even be able to download and build Wine 9.21 staging, when yabridge worked.

Every few weeks, a new dev will find this problem and look into fixing it. By having a history, this dev can always look back on the working implementation. Maybe one day there will be a series of function calls in the new Wine codebase that gets the same behavior that worked before? Maybe Wine adds a flag for yabridge that reintroduces the old functionality but retains for everyone else the changes they decided were necessary. Both avenues would fix the bug but from different ends.

(I understand Wine avoiding the flag solution: It's more to maintain just to help a single project, plus it introduces a conditional jump fail in the very active event handler and windowing subsystems affecting nearly every Wine user, and the development of Wine keeps moving, which could make a flag-based workaround redundant in the near future.)

I haven't opened my DAW in a few months. Last I knew, the problem is resolved for most users but not all, and there might have been a major breakthrough in April or May that still hasn't reached end users.

[vlovich123]

> I understand Wine avoiding the flag solution

I don’t - Windows keeps a compatibility database for a reason. It seems inevitable that you’d need to maintain that too to keep apps working or drop support. The performance is a non-sequiter for a few reasons. Even in the hot path the conditional is going to get speculated away since the wine subsystem is uniquely instantiated per application. If you were really paranoid you could ship multiple binaries and select which ones to use dynamically at runtime. I suspect the bigger problem is one of maintenance - Microsoft does this with a huge budget and a huge team whose sole responsibility is maintaining that comparability. A community project is going to have to make more pragmatic choices.

[cyberrock]

Diagnosing why a bug happened is interesting. Sometimes it points to a communication shortcoming that the project/organization should strive to improve on. Of course, if you're slinging code with a few buddies, it might not matter.

In the worst/most paranoid case (xz) you might also want to know who planted a backdoor and where else they made commits to.

[StilesCrisis]

You can see what the code looked like before the bug was added, and in many cases, just change it back to how it used to be?

The most obvious use case for history is "roll back this entire CL, it's broken".

[skeledrew]

Chesterton's Fence.

[Shatnerz]

Checking git history is one of the first things I do when I find unfamiliar code or when I'm debugging something. Git history contains a lot of context that helps speed up the rest of the process

[owaislone]

Enables the best git command ever: git bisect

[imron]

Yes! An incredible tool. You'll rarely need to use it, but when you do it's invaluable.

[pastakatsu]

You've truly never come across a single thing you've gone to "fix" only to have it break stuff and then explained why it needs to stay that way in a commit message?

[taybin]

There are several possible reasons for that, but I'll just say it's a very common use case. It's actually the one of the original use cases for SCSs. How else could you revert to a prior commit?

[actionfromafar]

If I'm taking a project in a completely different direction, with different people, I might not care about commit history very much. But I worry more from a licensing standpoint. Unless a project has a strict copyright re-assignment policy (uncommon) where all contributors sign over their copyright (not just contribute their "patch" under the designated license), the copyrYight history is lost or at best muddled.

Now, in practical terms, one can always go back to the original repo and find it. But if I was doing this in a corporate $DAYJOB, I'd keep the history just to be sure.

[jeltz]

I still would want the history easy to reach because when I find weird code I almost always reach directly to git log.