Re: [9fans] Sources Gone?

["Roman V. Shaposhnik" <rvs@sun.com>]

On Thu, 2009-01-29 at 09:18 -0800, Russ Cox wrote:
> Onr fundamental difference is that the latter set is
> intended to keep trees exactly in sync,

"trees" tend to be highly overloaded, but if you refer
to the filesystem hierarchy as seem by open, then the
above statement, if applied to Git, is misleading.

Git specifically opted out for some additional complexity
in favor of treating the non-mutable hash addressed history
and write buffer differently.

Not realizing that git makes this distinction, makes people
surprised when they try to push their own history into
the repositories of others only to find out that the
tree they see locally doesn't match the tree that is on
the other end.

This rigid distinction was one of the factors that swayed
us in favor of Git when we did internal evaluation of
DSCMs about a yer ago. It really makes things much more
manageable.

> The replica tools are not SHA1-based because they
> cannot depend on the user having a venti to manage
> the blocks, and managing a separate copy of the data
> (like the dvcs's do) seemed out of character with
> fitting well into the surrounding system.

That is well understood and replica definitely has its
place in Plan9.

That said, what would be your thoughts on developing the
tools (and interfaces perhaps) for fetching up venti
blocks between two systems in a secure and manageable way.

It seems that as a *complimentary* solution this would
achieve quite a few benefits of Git/etc.

Thanks,
Roman.