Understanding hg log history after renames

[Anton Markov]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mercurial-bounces at selenic.com [mailto:mercurial-
> bounces at selenic.com] On Behalf Of Harvey Chapman
> Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 2010 11:15 PM
> To: mercurial at selenic.com
> Subject: Understanding hg log history after renames
> 
> I have two files, A & B. I delete A and then rename B to A with commits
> after each step. I kind of understand why "hg log A" shows the revision
> history of the original A even though it's not the same file. But if
> it's going to do that, why not show the history of B, too (without
> needing -f), since that actually is the same file?
> 

I believe that the --follow flag is there for performance reasons because it
takes a certain amount of extra checks to detect renames even on files that
were never renamed. In this case, detecting that B was renamed to A is the
expensive operation we try to avoid without the --follow flag.


~Anton