I am trying to trace a piece of code (just a single line) to it's commit.
Using blame only points me to a commit where this line in question was moved as a part of an extract method style refactoring.
What techniques can I use to get to the commit were that particular text existed in the codebase for the first time?
As noted in this answer to git: finding a commit that introduced a string, you can simply use
git log -S <line>
# or
git log -G <regex>
to find the first occurrence of a line of code in a repository.
From the official Linux kernel Git documentation for log:
-S<string>Look for differences that introduce or remove an instance of
<string>. Note that this is different than the string simply appearing in diff output; see the pickaxe entry in gitdiffcore(7) for more details.-G<regex>Look for differences whose added or removed line matches the given
<regex>.