Re: Adding Git to Better SCM Initiative : Comparison

On Sun, Jan 13, 2008 at 01:44:10AM +0100, Jakub Narebski wrote:

What does "Renames Support" mean? 

Accordingly to the clarification provided there, it means retaining the
history of the file when its name changed. So I would write like this:

Yes. Git can automatically detects renames and show history together,
however being content oriented rather than file oriented, the notion of
"retaining the history of the file" can not exactly applied to it.

Because the answer,
especially in the case of git which is a bit different in that it does
rename detection and not rename tracking (using inodes / file-ids),
depends on that...

Git is different in that it tracks the content as the whole rather than
tracking a set of files. When you look at some source code, what you
really want to know who and why wrote *this*, and usually it does not
matter to you whether it was written in this file or another one. CVS
is really bad at that, because if you renamed a file, it would be very
difficult to go back to history and find that. Many file-ids based SCMs
have solved this problem, however, they do not do any better than CVS
in another very common case -- when your code is moved around as result
of refactoring, but Git addresses both problems, not just one!

So, it is not as much about explicit renaming vs automatic, but about
different design goals. After finishing reading this questionnaire,
it seems to me that a more proper title for it would be "Better CVS
Initiative", so it is not surprisingly that Git does not fit into it
well. It is like trying to put characteristics of your LCD into a
questionnaire for CRT monitors -- some does not make sense, other
misleading, and most important ones are not mentioned anyway...


Dmitry