An un-tapped benefit of Bazaar over the other DVCS's?

Teemu Likonen tlikonen at iki.fi
Wed Aug 12 06:58:48 BST 2009


On 2009-08-11 23:06 (-0400), Inky wrote:
> I was watching a talk online about Git (maybe the one by Randal S.?)
> and I'm pretty sure the point was clearly made that Git tracks changes
> in *content* rather than changes in individual files.
>
> It may be that Mercurial does the same thing. Not sure.
>
> The point was also made that, due to this particular feature, it might
> not be very beneficial to use Git for putting your `/etc` or your home
> dir under version control -- since the files don't really have
> anything to do with eachother as a whole.

This "Git only tracks content, not files" comes from quite technical way
of seeing things. An ordinary user may not even notice the difference
and still use Git successfully. The content-tracking thing will probably
appear first with "git add" when user realizes that in Git it means "add
the _current_ content of these files/paths to the staging area for the
next commit". In many other systems "$vcs add" command means "start
tracking and caring about this file".

People use Git to track /etc or home directory. The content-tracking
feature has nothing to do with it so you can concentrate on other
features when choosing a version control tool for that purpose. Possibly
the most important defect (in Git at least) is that it doesn't track
file ownership and for permission bits it only tracks the executable
bit.



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