how often is "understanding your project history" something that actually comes up for you? In all my years of working with projects in git, I will occasionally look at my history to help me find a change that may have led to a bug, but it really only comes up for me once or twice a year and even then, it is rarely an extensive deep dive and never very far back in time.
>how often is "understanding your project history" something that actually comes up for you?
Frequently, for any long and complex project. Large amounts were written by people no longer working on it, and the history of how things came to be can help fill in documentation gaps and make intent clear.
By "frequently" I mean something like "I check history for about 2/3rds of bug fixes, and 1/4 of adding features" to understand the surroundings better, when writing or reviewing. Anything that makes that better saves me hours per week.
It catches and prevents more than enough subtle issues to be worth the effort.
I'm on a long and complex project. However most of previous folks were not very good and one reason I'm here to fix it. Their history is not particularly useful except to giggle at.
It's others history that I'm usually interested in. I can easy follow the small diffs of individual commits, but have a much harder time grokking a wall of red and green.
When I’m on call and discover at 3 AM that we’re doing something weird, I need to know whether we meant to do that and especially why. In theory you could write all that down, but the people who aren’t doing that in git also won’t do it outside of git. The more you write down, the less likely it is that I need to page you to ask WTF.
It comes up often enough. I run "git blames" frequently to figure why something odd looking was introduced. It may not be a bug, but a WTF. This is in an environment with few code reviews, despite my attempts to introduce them. It is frustrating.
Sometimes. Once every few months. Sometimes it conveys useful information. Sometimes it just hits the "product imported from previous VCS a decade ago" commit.
