Re: [Monotone-devel] Comparison of Monotone and git

[Bruce Stephens]

Matthew Nicholson <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> I like the idea of local branch namespaces.  How do they implement it?
> Just use like the sha1 hash of various things as the true branch name
> and then map that to a texual name locally?

No.  commits don't contain any branch information.  commits form a DAG
(because they contain reference to their parents).  A branch is a ref
to the head of the branch.  It can be a simple file, for example
.git/refs/heads/master might contain the text
0bea2424197ef0c389a153aa968dc884e71d1638.

So branches can't have multiple heads.  And whether a commit belongs
to some branch is a local question---the commit itself belongs to a
DAG, but which branches exist and what they're called is local.

(For efficiency these refs can be packed into larger files---having
lots of small files would slow things down.)