Re: Mercurial 0.4b vs git patchbomb benchmark

Linus Torvalds
2005-05-02T22:00:32Z

On Mon, 2 May 2005, Bill Davidsen wrote:
>
> If there is a functional reason to use git, something Mercurial doesn't
> do, then developers will and should use git. But the associated hassles
> with large change size, rather than the absolute size, are worth
> considering.

Note that we discussed this early on, and the issues with full-file
handling haven't changed. It does actually have real functional
advantages:

- you can share the objects freely between different trees, never
worrying about one tree corrupting another trees object by mistake.
- you can drop old objects.

delta models very fundamentally don't support this.

For example, a simple tree re-linker will work on any mirror site, and
work reliably, even if I end up uploading new objects with some tool that
doesn't know to break hardlinks etc. That can easily be much more than a
10x win for a git repository site (imagine something like bkbits.net, but
got git).

Whether it is a huge deal or not, I don't know. I do know that the big
deal to me is just the simplicity of the git object models. It makes me
trust it, even in the presense of inevitable bugs. It's a very safe model,
and right now safe is good.

Linus