Bazaar still below the radar when evaluating VCS tools

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Joseph Wakeling writes:

 > Incidentally, it notes that 'Both Mercurial and Git handle renames
 > cleanly'.  Is this now true ... ?

Yes and no.  Mercurial and git (especially git) take the point of view
that they are tracking content, and a "file" is a way to associate a
name with content, and not much more than that.  Bazaar considers that
a file is an abstract type which has a "name" attribute and a
"content" attribute.  Thus in git or mercurial it's only possible to
detect a rename if the contents remain substantially intact, while in
Bazaar it is possible to rename a file even if its contents are
deleted entirely.  While that extreme case is probably not of much
interest, it seems to be the case that the Bazaar approach has nice
properties for refactoring in languages like Java or Make where the
content of files must correspond properly to names in the file system.