On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 3:27 PM, Ron Garret <ron1@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > So I think I'm beginning to understand how this works, but that leads me > to another question: it seems to me that there are potential screw cases > for this purely content-based system of tracking files. For example, > suppose I have a directory full of sample config files, all of which are > similar to each other. Will that cause diffcore to get confused? Cases like that are always confusing, even to humans. Person A renames X to Y, but at the same time creates Z which is almost identical. Person B patches X, then merges in person A's changes. What do you expect to happen? Should Y be changed, because that's the file X was moved from? Or should we change Z, because it's almost the same content anyway? Or maybe we should change both, since a change to the old X is probably intended to affect the copied *content* that ended up in both Y and Z? Simply storing whether person A has renamed vs. copied vs. added a file makes the answer to the "what do you expect to happen" question more obvious, but fails to answer the "what *should* happen" question. Thus it's more of a distraction than a feature. It took a while for me to accept this, but once I did, I realized that git's behaviour has still never caused me a problem in real life, despite repeated file renames and complicated merges. In contrast, svn's explicit rename tracking has shot me in the foot numerous times. (svn remembers when I delete file X and then subsequently re-add it with the same content. So if I merge in someone's change to the *old* file X, it barfs because omg omg that's a totally different file X and it can't possibly figure out what to do. Gee, thanks. It's also hopelessly incompetent at handling "renames" in which a newbie developer didn't know to use svn mv, but instead used svn rm, mv, and svn add.) Have fun, Avery -- 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