VCS comparison table

[Linus Torvalds]

On Tue, 17 Oct 2006, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> > 
> > Excuse me? What does that "throws away your local commit ordering" mean?
> 
> Say this is the ordering in branch A:
> 
> a
> |
> b
> |
> c
> 
> Say this is the ordering in branch B:
> 
> a
> |
> b
> |\
> d c
> |/
> e
> 
> When A pulls B, it gets the same ordering as B has.  If B did not have e
> and c, the pull would fail.

Sure. But that doesn't throw away any local commit ordering. The original 
order (a->b->c) is still very much there. The fact that there was a branch 
off 'b' and there is also (a->b->d) and a merge of the two at 'e' doesn't 
take away anything from the original local commit ordering. 

> > So generating an extra "merge" commit would be actively wrong, and adds 
> > "history" that is not history at all.
> 
> It's not a tree change, but it records the fact that one branch merged
> the other.

But that's a totally specious "record". It has no meaning in a distributed 
SCM. There is absolutely zero semantic information in it.

The fact that you _locally_ want to remember where you were is a total 
non-issue for a true distributed system. You shouldn't force everybody 
else to see your local view - since it has no relevance to them, and 
doesn't add any information.

> Maybe not in Git.

I don't think there is any in bzr either. Can you explain?

In other words, the empty merge is totally semantically empty even in the 
bazaar world. Why does it exist?

		Linus