Re: VCS comparison table

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Linus Torvalds wrote:

On Tue, 17 Oct 2006, Aaron Bentley wrote:

quoted

quoted

quoted

Interesting.  We don't do 'fast-forward' in that case.

Fast-forward is a really good idea. Perhaps you could implement it,
if it is not hidden under different name?

We support it as 'pull', but merge doesn't do it automatically, because
we'd rather have merge behave the same all the time, and because 'pull'
throws away your local commit ordering.

Excuse me? What does that "throws away your local commit ordering" mean?

Say this is the ordering in branch A:

a
|
b
|
c

Say this is the ordering in branch B:

a
|
b
|\
d c
|/
e

When A pulls B, it gets the same ordering as B has.  If B did not have e
and c, the pull would fail.

So generating an extra "merge" commit would be actively wrong, and adds 
"history" that is not history at all.

It's not a tree change, but it records the fact that one branch merged
the other.

It also means that if people merge back and forth from each other, you get 
into an endless loop of useless merge commits.

You can pull if you don't want that.  We haven't found that people are
very fussed about it.

There's no reason _ever_ to not just fast-forward if one repository is a 
strict superset of the other.

Maybe not in Git.

Aaron
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