VCS comparison table

[Jeff King]

On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 04:16:15PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> It would be easy to send the exact same data as the native git protocol 
> sends over ssh (or the git port) as an email encoding. We did that a few 
> times with BK (there it's called "bk send" and "bk receive" to pack and 
[...]
> That said, "bundles" certainly wouldn't be _hard_ to do. And as long as 
> nobody tries to send _me_ any of them, I won't mind ;)

I never used BK, but my understanding is that it was based on
changesets, so a bundle was a group of changesets. Because a git commit
represents the entire tree state, how can we avoid sending the entire
tree in each bundle? The interactive protocols can ask "what do you
have?" but an email bundle is presumably meant to work without a round
trip.

We could always make a guess ("git send --remote-has master~10") but
that seems awfully error-prone. I assume a changeset-oriented system
would implicitly keep some concept of "I think Linus is at master~10"
and do it automatically.

-Peff