Re: Mercurial 0.4b vs git patchbomb benchmark

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Apr 29, 2005, 14:34 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0504290728090.18901@ppc970.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <20050429074043.GT21897@waste.org>

On Fri, 29 Apr 2005, Matt Mackall wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> 
> Mercurial is even younger (Linus had a few days' head start, not to
> mention a bunch of help), and it is already as fast as git, relatively
> easy to use, much simpler, and much more space and bandwidth
> efficient.

You've not mentioned two out of my three design goals:
 - distribution
 - reliability/trustability

ie does mercurial do distributed merges, which git was designed for, and does mercurial notice single-bit errors in a reasonably secure manner, or can people just mess with history willy-nilly?

For the latter, the cryptographic nature of sha1 is an added bonus - the _big_ issue is that it is a good hash, and an _exteremely_ effective CRC of the data. You can't mess up an archive and lie about it later. And if you have random memory or filesystem corruption, it's not a "shit happens" kind of situation - it's a "uhhoh, we can catch it (and hopefully even fix it, thanks to distribution)" thing.

I had three design goals. "disk space" wasn't one of them, so you've concentrated on only one so far in your arguments.

		Linus