« BackFind the oldest line in your repomilofultz.comSubmitted by surprisetalk 4 days ago
  • lb1lf 4 hours ago

    Not on Git, but I was curious and grepped through the Siemens S7 repository I maintain at work; we've been using the same comment practice since forever, with the date in ISO8601 format. (Since before ISO 8601 even was a thing!)

    Oldest I found?

    1986-06-17: Trygve glemte å sjekke om vi deler på null. Fikset.

    (Trygve forgot to check whether we divide by zero. Fixed.)

    • loeber 3 hours ago

      Incredible. This is like Graffiti from Pompeii.

      • akoboldfrying 2 hours ago

        Ugh. That is sooo Trygve.

        • NoMoreNicksLeft 3 hours ago

          You've got me beat... at a previous job, there were comments from 1991 complaining about how it was ported/rewritten from cobol.

          • jamesfinlayson 3 hours ago

            Ported to what?

            • NoMoreNicksLeft an hour ago

              Oracle Pro*C. You don't want to know.

              • NetOpWibby 27 minutes ago

                I’ve never even heard of this before. Talk about old-school!

          • nonameiguess 2 hours ago

            Yep. Huge limitation of this approach is the assumption the code has always lived in the same VCS. I remember migrating a monorepo for geointelligence processing algorithms years back to multiple repos, and its own history was it had been in Mercurial before Git, ClearCase before Mercurial, and God knows what earlier than that. But I was reviewing old Fortran code for handling specific vehicle missions and could see from the mission codes that some of these were satellites launched in the late 80s, so the code itself had to be even older than that.

          • js2 2 hours ago

            You don't need to blame every file[1]. Use `git rev-list` to find your oldest commit:

              git rev-list --reverse --date-order HEAD | head -1  # or
              git rev-list --reverse --author-date-order HEAD | head -1
            
            To see the files in that commit:

              git ls-tree -lr <commit-id>
            
            To see a particular file:

              git show <commit-id>:/path/to/file  # or
              git cat-file -p <commit-id>:/path/to/file
            
            [1] Caveat: I suppose this doesn't account for files which no longer exist or that have been completely re-written.

            https://git-scm.com/docs/git-rev-list

            https://git-scm.com/docs/git-ls-tree

            https://git-scm.com/docs/git-show

            https://git-scm.com/docs/git-cat-file

            https://git-scm.com/docs/gitrevisions

            • kazinator an hour ago

              Yes, your caveat is correct: it's possible that none of the lines present in your oldest commit have survived into the current head commit of your main branch.

              Not sure how the article's algorithm deals with renames. If a file being renamed as a deletion and addition, then that conceals the age of the lines.

              • roetlich an hour ago

                > I suppose this doesn't account for files which no longer exist or that have been completely re-written.

                But... that's the point of this? Finding the initial commit is not nearly as fun as looking at the oldest code that is still running.

              • lutherqueen 5 hours ago

                Similar oneliner to paste on MacOS terminal and get the eldest line for each file extension:

                for ext in $(git ls-files | grep -vE 'node_modules|\.git' | awk -F. '{if (NF>1) print $NF}' | sort -u); do echo -e "\n.$ext:"; git ls-files | grep "\.$ext$" | xargs -I {} git blame -w {} 2>/dev/null | LC_ALL=C sort -t'(' -k2 | head -n1; done

                • kazinator an hour ago

                  If any of the lines form the repo's first commit happen to be untouched, then that's a huge short-cut: those lines are the oldest. Finding one of those lines manually is a pretty easy task. Enumerating them all accurately, less so.

                  • skeptrune 6 hours ago

                    I like leaving something like gitlens on so I can see the super old lines ad-hoc when I naturally come across them. It's fun to get glimpses of the past.

                    • cmgriffing 4 hours ago

                      Take my upvote :)

                    • OJFord 7 hours ago

                      It's probably almost always going to be a boring config line(s) in the initial commit?

                      A section header in a pylintrc or Cargo.toml, a Django settings.py var, etc. Or even an import/var in a file that's core enough to still exist, import logging and LOGGER = ... for example.

                      • lionkor 4 hours ago

                        You underestimate the amount of software that starts with CRUFT

                      • hoten 6 hours ago

                        "Initial Commit", 9 years ago (transfered an at-the-time 15 year old SVN repo)

                        sigh..

                        • jamesfinlayson 2 hours ago

                          Sigh indeed... at a previous job there was a project that was a port of an Algol project that began in 1992. I have no idea what version control systems were used in its history (wouldn't be surprised if it started with no version control) but the last version control migration was from Team Foundation Service to GitHub and of course it was just a single commit of the then current master. 23 years of history gone.

                          • krick 6 hours ago

                            FWIW, when I ported SVN repos at work, I converted the commit history as well.

                            • notwhereyouare 6 hours ago

                              we hired contractors to move us from source gear to git and they said "moving the history would be too hard, so we didn't"

                              lost probably 10+ years of history

                              • almostnormal 5 hours ago

                                Renaming the company is also fun when its name is used for folders / package paths. The history isn't lost, just unusable.

                                • kridsdale3 4 hours ago

                                  There are a million files in the Meta monorepo starting with FB. I don't think they even changed the practice.

                                  • pavlov 4 hours ago

                                    You see, the “fb” in fbcode stands for “fierce & beautiful”.

                                • JensRantil 5 hours ago

                                  facepalm

                                • hoten 5 hours ago

                                  yeah... wasn't me that did it though. Same group of people did it with a git repository they "recreated" more recently. They just don't know how to software.

                                  I got my hands on the old SVN but it's a few TBs and so I had some trouble unzipping it. Maybe someday I'll patch a branch for blame archeology.

                              • zellyn 5 hours ago

                                In our monorepo (of 101470 Java files, according to

                                    find . -name '*.java' | wc -l
                                
                                ), I shudder to think how long that would take. For large repos, I imagine you could get quite a bit faster by only considering files created before the oldest date you've found so far.
                                • JensRantil 5 hours ago

                                  Not sure why all the lines of code. This is much shorter:

                                      git ls-files|xargs -n 1 git blame --date=format:%Y%m%d -f |grep -Eo '\d{8}.*' |sort -r | head -n 1 | sed 's/^[^)]*) \t//'
                                  
                                  (on MacOSX)
                                  • js2 2 hours ago

                                    Get in the habit of using `ls-files -0` and `xargs -0` to prevent surprises. But there's no need to blame every file:

                                    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42883340

                                    • jamesfinlayson 2 hours ago

                                      Hm, tried this on a Mac but something must be askew - it returned a commit by me in 2022 in a repo that has existed since at least 2017.

                                      • pc86 4 hours ago

                                        Formatting strikes again

                                        • JensRantil 4 hours ago

                                          Thanks. Fixed.

                                      • verytrivial 4 hours ago

                                        Our code base still has ghost comments about code being just so because the NeXT compiler won't accept it any other way. No one has the heart to remove them.

                                        • jamesfinlayson 2 hours ago

                                          I picked up a project from 1999 a few years ago that still had far pointer macros - I didn't think they were still a thing in 1999 so I'm not sure why they were there to start with. I think I've left them though.

                                          • nortlov 4 hours ago

                                            I imagine future engineers as archaeologists of software development, in a way, digging through ghost comments like fossils in the code.

                                            • chrisweekly 3 hours ago

                                              future engineers? archaeology is an essential part of virtually every real-world software project

                                          • abejfehr 5 hours ago

                                            doesn't seem to work on macOS, I get:

                                              find: illegal option -- t
                                              usage: find [-H | -L | -P] [-EXdsx] [-f path] path ... [expression]
                                                     find [-H | -L | -P] [-EXdsx] -f path [path ...] [expression]
                                            • spatten 4 hours ago

                                              I ran into that too. Turns out that you need to add in the path you want to search when invoking the command. If it's your current working directory, use `.`

                                            • lionkor 4 hours ago

                                              At my old job, I remember it was some time at the beginning of the 1990s. I was born like 8 years after the code I was working on was written.

                                              • kridsdale3 4 hours ago

                                                Oldest file I ever had to fix was the same age as me: 1986. Found a bug in 2013. Timezone math.

                                              • rozenmd 5 hours ago

                                                > README.md 2021-01-28 17:27:57 +1100

                                                Huh, TIL the birthdate of my business was actually a couple of days ago.

                                                • donatj 7 hours ago

                                                  I wrote a similar maybe hacky script using `git blame` on every file. In our main application, we still have a couple lines from the initial commit in 2011.

                                                  • password4321 6 hours ago

                                                    Always start your git repos with an empty commit, right?

                                                    • francisofascii 6 hours ago

                                                      Maybe a readme.md with the initial name, a license file, and a .gitignore file. Whatever it is that all repos would have regardless of the language or application type.

                                                    • ceejayoz 7 hours ago

                                                      I suspect it'll be index.php's <?php line, lol.

                                                      • inglor_cz 6 hours ago

                                                        Sep 30, 2008 at 5:03:58pm, revision 1.

                                                        It is SVN, though, and not Git.

                                                        • kridsdale3 4 hours ago

                                                          What if my repo is older than git?