Tracking filesystem entries as first-class VCS citizens (was: Bazaar still below the radar when evaluating VCS tools)

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Wed, 2010-02-24 at 10:53 +0000, Paul Moore wrote:
> On 24 February 2010 09:40, Ben Finney <ben+bazaar at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> > "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:
> >
> >> 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.
> >
> > Bazaar is tracking more than just the name, but is also tracking other
> > attributes of the filesystem entry. Ones I know of include the
> > executable permission and the entry type (directory, normal file,
> > symbolic link, etc.).
> >
> > These are important data about filesystem entries, that I want
> > reconstructed when applying changes from the VCS to the working tree.
> >
> > AFAICT, that means Git and Mercurial (by the above description) don't
> > track some important information about files that Bazaar does. In other
> > words, I don't agree with Git or Mercurial that “a file is a way to
> > associate a name with content”, since there are other things a file is
> > for.
> 
> FWIW, I don't believe that Stephen is right about Mercurial. My
> understanding is that Mercurial tracks file renames in much the same
> way as Bazaar. Git is the odd one out in tracking content rather than
> names.

Mercurial doesn't track renames but it does support copies of files.

Cheers,

Jelmer
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