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copied!<p>On a personal level, I prefer your simplified option.</p> <p><strong>Reason: Blame isn't used very much anyway.</strong></p> <p>So I don't see a point in wasting a lot of time doing a comprehensive implementation of it.</p> <p>It's true. Blame has largely turned out to be one of those "pot of gold at the end of the rainbow" features. It looked really cool from those of us standing on the ground, dreaming about a day when we could just click on a file and see who wrote which lines of code. But now that it's widely implemented, most of us have come to realize that it actually isn't very helpful. Check the activity on the <code>blame</code> tag here on Stack Overflow. It is underwhemingly desolate.</p> <p>I have run across dozens of "blame-worthy" scenarios in recent months alone, and in most cases I have attempted to use blame first, and found it either cumbersome or utterly unhelpful. Instead, I found the information I needed by doing a simple filtered changelog on the file in question. In some cases, I could have found the information using Blame as well, had I been persistent, but it would have taken much longer.</p> <p>The main problem is code formatting changes. The first-tier blame for almost everything was listed as... me! Why? Because I'm the one responsible for fixing newlines and tabs, re-sorting function order, splitting functions into separate utility modules, fixing comment typos, and improving or simplifying code flow. And if it wasn't me, someone else had done a whitespace or block-move somewhere along-the-way as well. In order to get a meaningful blame on anything dating back to a time before I can already remember without the help of blame, I had to roll back revisions and re-blame. And re-blame again. And again. </p> <p>So in order for a blame to actually be a useful time saver for more than the most lucky of situations, the blame has to be able to heuristicly make its way past newline, whitespace, and ideally block copy/move changes. That sounds like a very tall order, especially when scouring the changelog for a single file, most of the time, it won't yield many diffs anyway and you can just sift through by hand fairly quickly. (The notable exception being, perhaps, badly engineered source trees where 90% of the code is stuffed in one or two ginormous files... but who these days in a collaborative coding environment does much of that anymore?).</p> <p>Conclusion: Give it a bare-bones implementation of blame, because some people like to see "it can blame!" on the features list. And then move on to things that matter. Enjoy!</p>

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