The commit before this one rewrote a hundred and fifty-three files without
changing what any of them does. Left alone, that is what `git blame` would name
for half the lines in the repo — the formatter, standing in front of whoever
actually wrote the line and whatever they were thinking at the time.
`.git-blame-ignore-revs` is the file that fixes it. GitHub reads it with no setup
at all, so the blame view on the web is already right; locally it needs
`git config blame.ignoreRevsFile .git-blame-ignore-revs` once, which is now step
two of the dev install in CONTRIBUTING alongside the editable install, since a
contributor who never runs it gets the wrong answer silently rather than an
error.
The file's header states the bar for being in it: whole-tree, provably
behaviour-free. That is a deliberately narrow door — an entry here makes a commit
invisible to the tool people use to ask why a line looks the way it does, and a
commit that changed anything real must never be able to hide behind it.
Verified rather than assumed: `git blame` on a line the sweep rewrote now reports
`f07f8c1b` from July, which is the commit that actually wrote it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jean-Pierre MartineauandClaude Opus 5