Re: git with custom diff for commits

["Martin Langhoff" <martin.langhoff@gmail.com>]

On Dec 19, 2007 11:48 AM, Johannes Schindelin
<Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
> Yes.  Changes, as in "take this _file_ instead".  Not "edit this file,
> remove those lines, add these here, etc.".

Exactly. GIT is a "content tracker" that doesn't care about any
semantic meaning in your files. Here's the file, git will store it, as
is. No conversions, not fancy interpretations. Strict, safe and fast.
(There's a small exception there for DOS-style newlines, which was
much resisted.)

You can add external machinery that is aware of your content semantics
-- as you've done with calling GNU diff with ignore patterns to decide
whether to commit or not. But when you tell GIT to commit something,
there's no guessing or transformation involved.

A lot of what GIT achieves is based on that founding principle. Remove
it, and we're toast. For starters, the internal machinery is based on
SHA1 digests that change if you flip a single byte. That's what makes
git fast and realiable. It's not merely an end-user thing.

cheers,


m