Johannes Schindelin wrote:
No, that message did not convince me. It was way too short on the side of facts.
Short of posting multiple historical versions of the third-party source code in question, I'm not sure what I can do to convince you. And I'd rather not violate the license agreement on that code. I would have thought, though, that the fact that I supplied a detailed, reproducible test case with obviously broken behavior would itself have been pretty convincing.
The fact that not all projects contain any short files, or any files whose contents have ever been identical, does not cause git's behavior in that test case to be correct. "It's broken and unfixable" is one thing; "It's broken and we don't care" is another; and "It's broken and we care but it's not at the top of anyone's priority list to fix" is something else again. All of those are fine, but "If it's broken, you are stupid" and "If it's broken, it's a sign your project isn't real" are not.
Or, to take another tack on this entirely, it is not the proper function of a version control system to dictate the contents of the projects under its control. It should take whatever we humans throw at it and reproduce those contents faithfully with coherent, non-jumbled history. It should do so even if what we're throwing at it is completely stupid.
By the way, I'll toss out one more example of legitimate duplicate files, though admittedly one where you might not care so much about history jumbling: if you have a project that makes use of two GPL libraries or utilities whose source you want to keep locally, e.g. because you are making local modifications, you will have two copies of the GNU "COPYING" file. Neither one produced by a build system (or at least, not by *your* build system) and you are not permitted by the terms of the GPL to publish a copy of either piece of software without a verbatim copy of its license -- it says so right in section 1 of the GPL (the "keep intact" wording.) Removing one of those copies and expecting a build system to reconstruct it after someone clones your repository would arguably be a violation of the GPL.
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