VCS comparison table

[Jeff King]

On Thu, Oct 26, 2006 at 12:52:05PM +0200, Vincent Ladeuil wrote:

> Ok, so git make a distinction between the commit (code created by
> someone) and the tree (code only).

Yes (a commit is a tree, zero or more parents, commit message, and
author/committer info).

> Commits are defined by their parents.

Partially, yes.

> Trees are defined by their content only ?

Yes.

> Calculate a sha1 representing the content (or the content of the
> diff from parent) of all the files and dirs in the tree ?  Or
> from the sha1s of the files and dirs themselves recursively based
> on sha1s of the files and dirs they contain ?

Recursively. Each tree is an ordered list of 4-tuples: pathname, type,
sha1, mode. If the type is "blob" then the sha1 is the hash of the file
contents. If the type is "tree" then the sha1 is the id of a sub-tree.
The id of a tree is the sha1 hash of the data structure.

> I ask because the later seems to provide some nice effects
> similar to what makes BDD
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_decision_diagram) so
> efficient: you can compare graphs of any complexity or size in
> O(1) by just comparing their signatures.

Yes, if two trees' hashes compare equal, they contain the same data. I
believe we are not currently using this optimization to find merge
differences, but there was some discussion earlier this week about doing
so.

-Peff