Re: Mercurial 0.4b vs git patchbomb benchmark

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: May 2, 2005, 22:02 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0505021457060.3594@ppc970.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <427650E7.2000802@tmr.com>

On Mon, 2 May 2005, Bill Davidsen wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> 
> If there is a functional reason to use git, something Mercurial doesn't 
> do, then developers will and should use git. But the associated hassles 
> with large change size, rather than the absolute size, are worth 
> considering.

Note that we discussed this early on, and the issues with full-file handling haven't changed. It does actually have real functional advantages:

 - you can share the objects freely between different trees, never 
   worrying about one tree corrupting another trees object by mistake.
 - you can drop old objects.

delta models very fundamentally don't support this.

For example, a simple tree re-linker will work on any mirror site, and work reliably, even if I end up uploading new objects with some tool that doesn't know to break hardlinks etc. That can easily be much more than a 10x win for a git repository site (imagine something like bkbits.net, but got git).

Whether it is a huge deal or not, I don't know. I do know that the big deal to me is just the simplicity of the git object models. It makes me trust it, even in the presense of inevitable bugs. It's a very safe model, and right now safe is good.

		Linus