On 17-03-2014, at 8:12 AM, H. Hirzel <hannes.hirzel at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Chris,
> 
> So far so good. But what would people do who still want to see the
> change history back to 4.1?
> 
> Is it possible to have them load the additional history as a
> separately down-loadable file in 4.6?
> 
> I assume it is, because Bob Arning is doing it back to version 1.0 in
> one of his images but the question is how much effort is this?

The .sources file should have the sources for each and every method that was in the image on the last occasion when ‘condenseSources’ was run. In ‘the old days’ that meant one and only one version of each method. The general idea was for each release you did a condense in order to get a single large .sources file and a virtually empty .changes file.

At some point an ‘appendChanges’ was added so that you could copy the latest version of any method source in the .changes to the end of the existing .sources - this makes for a single large[r] file and the empty .changes but does give you a single step of history for any of the methods changed since the last condenseSources.

I don’t know, but anticipate that a second ‘appendChanges’ would just add any subsequently changed methods’ source, which makes for a gradually growing .sources file that might be useful or might be ludicrously large, depending upon how much code gets changed over time.

I’m not a big fan of the append approach in general. To maintain a history I much prefer the online server that can provide that info - as provided both by Chris Muller’s MC History (so much cooler than MC Hammer) and Bob’s site that I can’t seem to find right now. It would be nice to have the changes browser and other history sensitive tools able to access them on request - shouldn’t happen by default since it takes time.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: BA: Branch Approximate