On 2016-05-20, at 11:10 AM, Sharan Basappa <sharan.basa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Folks, > > I am pretty much new to Git though I am using it for a couple of projects > (without much understanding as such). > >In Git documents, it is mentioned that Git stores data as a stream of >snapshots. Compared to other VCS tools, the only difference I am able to tell >is that Git stores the entire file for each versions while other VCS tools >might store only differences. >Can someone help me understand this? Sure. Think of Git as a three layered tool. The top layer is a polished interface, called "Porcelain", that is designed to easily manage snapshots and compares and merges of filesystem trees. The bottom layer, on the other hand, is a filesystem. Files in this filesystem are read-only. The names of files are fixed based on their content. So identical files have the same name, and are stored once in the file system. Building up from fixed files that do not change, are directory objects, that map human understandable filenames to internal names. And, since this is itself a filesystem object, if everything in a directory is identical, then the directory entry is identical, and only stored once. Based on this, it's pretty easy to see that if two commits are completely identical, then the only thing that differs is the commit object itself, which will have a time stamp and user comment. (The middle layer by the way, are low-level tools designed to work with the files in this filesystem.) --- Entertaining minecraft videos http://YouTube.com/keybounce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Git for human beings" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to git-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
