Post #4348640
2026-08-02 11:12 UTC
Many times in my career I’ve found myself working on software that is 15-20+ years old and has seen multiple generations of developers come and go. What strikes me is that the VCS history is never complete. Large swathes of early design decisions and context are missing. I find there’s often a sort of folklore history that then develops, with collective imagining of why certain features exist or are designed the way they are. Often these post-hoc rationales don’t really hold up to scrutiny, or are (IMO) anachronistic.
Hopefully these days we are a bit more aware of the importance of preserving history when switching version control software. But I do still wonder how much historical context gets lost in forgotten wikis, bug trackers etc. This is one of the reasons I like fossil - it’s all part of the version history. ADRs in the repo are also a good idea, but in my experience lots of architectural decisions happen at the org-level rather than individual project level, so again end up on a wiki instead.
Anyone seen examples of multi-decade projects that have successfully maintained accurate knowledge of early design decisions?
Replies (1)
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@dkf@cyberplace.social 2026-08-03 07:46
@neilmadden@infosec.exchange Python does fairly well at tracking this sort of thing via PEPs. There might be some loss from the early stages, but that seems to be often true due to nobody realising at the time that it was important to keep it. Transitioning between VCSs is a key time when there's information loss. Or when the product gets moved between companies.