From: Linus Torvalds Date: Mon, 02 May 2005 22:02:16 GMT Subject: Re: Mercurial 0.4b vs git patchbomb benchmark Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <427650E7.2000802@tmr.com> On Mon, 2 May 2005, Bill Davidsen wrote: > > 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