On Apr 29, 2009, at 2:34 AM, Jeff King wrote:
On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 08:53:37PM -0400, David Abrahams wrote:
Actually, it is not the generally of trees that I think is
interesting
there, but the generality of _objects_. That is, each of those
things is
a first-class object, and has a unique name by which it can be
referred.
I'm sorry, but I think most people would find that so unremarkable
that
making a big deal about it would lead to "what am I missing here"
confusion. Maybe a person who's exclusively used CVS (or older)
technologies before coming to Git would be happy to know that, but
it's
sort of obvious. In CVS the lack of first-class directories sticks
out
like a sore thumb.
Sadly, I was away from email all weekend and so missed the ensuing
storm
in this thread. :) However, I did want to respond to this one point.
To me (and I am talking from personal experience, so it really may be
_just_ me), an important part of understanding git was understanding
the
object storage. That is, half of the idea of git is a big database of
content-addressable objects.
Absolutely, it's important to know that everything is content-
addressable (which essentially communicates the same important
information as "the object's id is a hash of its contents"). I was
trying to say that the fact that each one is a "first-class" object
and has a unique name is not particularly remarkable.
--
David Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://boostpro.com
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