Re: Git and ident of binaries

[Thomas Adam <thomas.adam22%gmail.com@localhost>]

2010/1/15 David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>:
> On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 11:56:43PM +0000, Thomas Adam wrote:
>  > That's the question you need to ask yourself, and people switching away 
> from
>  > different RCSes to a distributed one which doesn't have the equivalence
>  > often the get confused as to why it's not there at all, or limited
>  > functionality is, but it is not the same.  The reason Git doesn't need $Id$
>  > expansion is because the content of the file matters a lot lot more than 
> the
>  > file itself, as content tends to shift, for instance.  Not only that but
>  > when you consider the history of a commit and the files it contains, the
>  > atomicity of a single file, as with CVS is not important at all in 
> something
>  > like Git.
>
> That paragraph just... does not make sense, I'm sorry. Especially the
> second half. Can you try again?

The second half to a paragraph?  Interesting.  :)  I'll try and clarify things.

> I'm aware that with whole-tree commits, the straightforward CVS-like
> expansion of $Id$ would be the same (except for the filename) in every
> file in the tree. However, I don't see why that makes it unnecessary
> or vacuous if you have (like NetBSD and every other OS tree does) a
> lot of different binary images built mostly from one or two source
> files each. If you run 'ident /usr/bin/fsplit' it doesn't much matter,
> at least for many purposes, whether the version string associated with
> fsplit.c is unique to fsplit.c or tree-wide; it's just the version of

All I am trying to make you realise is that the version of the file
doesn't mean *as* much as the content that's in it -- since Git tracks
the content, and not the files themselves.  So if you had "functionA"
in fileA.c and then moved it to "fileB.c", *that* sort of history is
considered a lot more important than what versionX of fileA.c happens
to be.

However, if it's something which is needed, sobeit.

-- Thomas Adam