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Do we think of git commits as diffs, snapshots, and/or histories? (jvns.ca)

submitted 10 months ago by canpolat to c/git

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Commits are snapshots with tracking that enables diffing and histories. git very specifically focuses on commits containing complete information (snapshots) instead of older diffing models that would need to sometimes replay diffs to arrive at a commit state.

[–] technom 2 points 10 months ago

Mercurial took an interesting approach here. It stores commits as diffs with occasional snapshots in between. This is similar to how video codecs store frames as deltas with occasional full 'keyframes' in between. This is the way Mercurial blunts the diff-replay problem you mentioned.

Git AFAIK, stores each file modification as full snapshot, until it is packed at some stage. Mercurial doesn't need this work around. Mercurial diffs are also format-neutral. It works fine with binary data.