On Wed, 27 Sep 2006, Matthew L Foster wrote: > > So the separate action of replication is not tracked? Correct. Replication without changes is a no-op. > Replication/sub merges are denied the possibility of "truth"? No, it's actually much deeper than that. To git, pure replication simply isn't an action at all, so trying to track it would be like trying to track all the voices in my head - something that doesn't exist. It wouldn't be "truth", it would be insanity. And the thing is, _not_ tracking it is really fundamental. If you actually track the issue of copying a git repository, you'd end up in a technically untenable and insane situation. You could never "merge" two git trees ever again without going into an infinite bouncing back-and-forth of "A merged the changes from B" and "B merged the fact that A merged the changes from B" and "A merged the fact that B merged the fact that A merged the changes from B" and so on ad infinitum. There's another reason too, namely that if you track where things came from and when, suddenly it matters whether you cloned from the _original_ repository or from somewhere else. And that's also fundamnetally wrong, since I don't actually want to give _anybody_ access to the actual original repository on my machine, so everything always has to go through an intermediate repository. If we tracked that, we'd just confuse everything, and it wouldn't be seamless any more. There's one final reason, namely that I wanted to design git to just track _contents_. So the design philosophy is very much against tracking exactly which repository something has been in, since that has nothing to do with the deeper issue of what you are actually tracking. Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html