Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 22 Jul 2007 21:47:02 +0200 (CEST) | From | Jan Engelhardt <> | Subject | Re: Git help for kernel archeology, suppress diffs caused by CVS keyword expansion |
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On Jul 22 2007 14:48, Jon Smirl wrote: > > It would really be useful if git diff had an option for suppressing > diffs caused by CVS keyword expansion. I run into this problem over > and over when trying to recover stuff out of old kernel sources that > people checked into CVS and then posted CVS diffs to fulfill their GPL > obligations. I sometimes wonder if vendors are doing this on purpose > to make it more difficult to recover the changes they made to the > code. > > To prevent this in the future, I'd love to see a patch removing all > CVS keywords from the kernel sources.
I say: yes please. Even svn (which Linus dislikes very much) has cvs keywords disabled by default. And at the same time, a patch to CodingStyle not to include CVS tags, and a patch to checkpatch.pl to enforce it :)
> Quick grep of kernel shows 1,535 $Id, 197 $Log, 441 $Revision, 144 $Date. I > guestimate that this would remove about 5,000 lines form the kernel source > and touch 1,700 files. Would this be accept or do those expansions contain > useful info?
Common argument for $Id$ tags has been, that upon a problem, a user can look into dmesg (or whatever log is appropraite - it's not limited to the kernel) for the version string instead of figuring it out himself (by means or rpm -q, or whatever hides it).
For the Linux kernel however, I do not think it is important, since:
- the code of a module changes faster than you can think (e.g. a change in the network code touched a network filesystem). Result: same $Id$ tag in the vendor's version AND the mainline version. So the tag is useless.
- you know what version you are running, mingetty usually prints it for you; uname -a also shows it.
- if you have a problem, people kindly ask you to bisect anyway, in which case $Id$ numbers become irrelevant anyway, because you got the git SHA1 ids.
Yep, that's pretty much it from my side. Conclusion: Remove CVS tags from kernel.
Jan -- - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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