We can fix these kinds of things without reference to the past, but the process would feel uniformed and impaired.
Not everything is in the code; there are sometimes questions of requirements, which are not always properly captured in documentation.
We need all the historic questions to be able to figure out the whole situation: what happened to the requirments as well as the code, and how it all relates.
2019 fix, of a 2011 breakage:
http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/txr/commit/?id=3a91828748385d8d6...
2020 removal of 2009 misfeature:
http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/txr/commit/?id=24bd936a9fa671599...
The TXR project only goes back to 2009.
We can fix these kinds of things without reference to the past, but the process would feel uniformed and impaired.
Not everything is in the code; there are sometimes questions of requirements, which are not always properly captured in documentation.
We need all the historic questions to be able to figure out the whole situation: what happened to the requirments as well as the code, and how it all relates.