On Sat, 2005-07-09 at 13:39 +0200, Petr Baudis wrote: > Dear diary, on Sat, Jul 09, 2005 at 02:12:27AM CEST, I got a letter > where Thomas Lord <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> told me that... > > 2.0 is very much git influenced but it brings some (imo significant) > > improvements to the table. > > Could you list some of the things interesting for us? What is the > benefit of a prereq graph compared to just having a single shared object > database? From the documentation, that's the only interesting thing I > noticed which is different from git (and things like artificially > limiting filename length to 256 characters).
Well, partly the statement about improvements was a hint to look beyond the docs to the code but... The prereq graph is, indeed, an improvement. It: * speeds up and simplifies blob-db GC * vastly improves the possibilities for archive integrity checking * can be used for smart, streamy network mirroring of revisions * allows people to commit the same tree multiple ways: e.g., once optimizing access for users who frequently read incremental updates and a second time for users who only update at named releases * helps make the system securable (current code isn't yet) against the possibility of multiple files with identical fingerprints but different contents in the same or related trees * helps in a variety of ways when it comes time to make `revc' operable over a network -- committing to a remote archive. Other advantageous (imo) changes from `git' not mentioned in the original message: * blobs do not have header lines Git blobs all begin with a line of text declaring the "type" and size of the blob. That doesn't increase database verifiability significantly and I found no use for the headers. Having the headers makes it needlessly complicated to translate a file to or from a blob. `revc' does not have blob headers. * `revc' uses portable file formats In working dirs, `git' stores binary files which are endian, word-size, and compiler-environment specific. `revc' stores some binary files too (for performance and simplicity reasons) but uses only portable formats. * `revc' is shaping up into much cleaner and more portable code (at least compared to the last version of `git' I saw -- which was extremely *lucid* code but not terribly clean and not even attempting to be portable.) The list goes on and I don't promise to be picking the most interesting items from it according to anybody's particular metric of "interesting". revc -- probably "strange yet familiar" to git hackers, -t - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html