Re: Change to bzr build instructions

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Leo <sdl.web@gmail.com>
>
>> Why would bzr insist people remember to use bzr mv instead of the
>> shell command mv?
>
> Because that way, there's no heuristics involved in inferring whether
> a file was renamed or not.  With bzr, renaming while also modifying
> the file's contents can be safely done in one commit instead of two.

Safety does not come into play here.  You can, of course, do the same in
git.  If you do this frequently, it makes sense to tell git to work
harder when reconstructing history.  When you do, git can also make
sense out of material factored out from several files into a single one
and vice versa, something which can't be told bzr as far as I know.

Of course, you need to _know_ when it will be helpful to ask for more,
and it might be an easier choice for the person actually doing the
checkin.  While it is usually easier to ask an automated tool for
working harder right now than a human, as long as the respective
information is likely to be read more often than written, letting the
human do the work while he still has complete knowledge about what he is
doing is a reasonable tradeoff.

The problem is when people consider it likely that nobody will actually
need this information: in that case still writing it requires
discipline.

And Eli asked for keeping this discipline because it makes life easier
in the long run given our choice of tools.

-- 
David Kastrup