VCS comparison table

[Linus Torvalds]

On Mon, 23 Oct 2006, Jakub Narebski wrote:
> 
> By the way, I wonder if accidentally identical revisions
> (see example for accidental clean merge on revctrl.org)
> would get the same revision id in bzr. In git they would.

git can have no "accidentally identical revisions". They'd have to be 
purposefully done, but yes, they'd obviously (on purpose) get the same 
revision name if that's the case.

You may think of tree (not commit) identity, where git on purpose names 
trees the same regardless of how you got to them. So on a _tree_ level, 
you are always supposed to get the same result regardless of how you 
import things (ie two people importing the same tar-ball should always get 
exactly the same tree ID).

But the actual commit names are identical only if the same people are 
claimed to have authored (and committed) them at the same time - so it's 
definitely not "accidental" if the commits are called the same: they 
really _are_ the same.

Btw, I think you misunderstand the term "accidental clean merge". It means 
that two identical changes on two branches will merge without conflicts 
being reported.

A merge algorithm that doesn't do "accidental clean merge" is totally 
broken. The accidental clean merge is a usability requirement for pretty 
much anything - you often have two branches doing the same thing (possibly 
for different reasons - two people independently found the same bug that 
showed itself in two different ways - so they may even think that they 
are fixing different issues, and may have written totally different 
changelogs to explain the bug, but the solution is identical and should 
obviously merge cleanly).

So "accidental clean merge" may _sound_ like something bad, but it's 
actually a seriously good property (it's really just a special case of 
"convergence" - again, that's a good thing).

		Linus