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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Inky 788 writes:

 > 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.

No, git (and Mercurial and bzr) at one level track changes in a *tree*
of directories and the files they contain.  At another level, they all
track changes in content for efficiency in operations like diff.
There is a fine point about tracking "containers", which git does not
do and bzr does (I don't know about Mercurial).  But that's a fine
point not relevant to tracking collections of unrelated files.

 > 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.

I don't see why tracking content should matter, certainly not by
comparison with other existing VCSes.

The real problem is that many users would like to keep all of the
mailman-related config files, all of the Postfix files, and all of the
Apache files conceptually separate, but managed in one tree, all
checked out at the same time.  None of the tree-oriented VCSes can
handle this, because they keep one database of metadata per tree, and
all versioned files' metadata are stored there.  There's no provision
for multiple metadata stores.

 > If Bazaar is different than this,

It's not.

 > and if it would work well for putting `/etc` or `~` under VC, you
 > might mention that fact on the BzrVsGit and BzrVsHg pages (linked
 > to from <http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrWhy>).

I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work well -- but git and hg
both work fine for me in similar contexts.  I have a couple of shell
aliases like

glsh () { git log $@ -- ~/.bashrc ~/.bash_profile ~/.functions; }

for "subprojects" that are spread out over a number of files.  It
would be nice if the VCS would take care of that for me, but that's
not a feature of any of them yet AFAIK.