Here’s a thing I miss about Perforce from Subversion, and I hope there’s a way I can still do it. Both systems have an annotate command, that shows for each line in the file what revision last touched it. It’s a great way to figure out how your code got to be the way it is.

But the Perforce annotate command offers the -a switch. This means show all revisions of all lines. So for example, if a certain line changed three times over the lifetime of the file, all three lines would appear in the annotated output, with the range of revisions that each was current. It’s a great tool for figuring out when some baffling change was introduced, so you can go back, read the checkin comment, get your head into the mindset of the time, and forensically understand the history of the code.

Is there a Subversion tool that can do this?