Re: Git benchmark - comparison with Bazaar, Darcs, Git and Mercurial

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Aug 2, 2007, 04:13 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0708012109040.3582@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <20070802040201.GI23484@lifeintegrity.com>

On Thu, 2 Aug 2007, Allan Wind wrote:

> 
> I would expect /something and file:///something to behave exactly the 
> same way (the latter just having bit extra syntax sugar).

I do agree that they should be basically the same, but from an implementation standpoint it actually makes a lot of sense to separate them. Also, there's actually a small amount of "logic" in it: the /something is obviously a "raw filename", while the "file:://something" clearly is something a lot more abstract.

I don't actually have a very strong opinion, but I do think that "file://" makes sense regardless (ie the patch I sent out is probably a good idea).

I also strongly dispute that "file://something" is _identical_ to just "something". There's a huge difference, as anybody who has ever tried to do

	cp file://file-A file-B

will have hopefully found out. They may mean the same thing, but they have totally different levels of abstraction, so it does actually make some sense that you end up *cloning* the same thing, but different ways.

		Linus