On Sat, Mar 24, 2018 at 6:57 PM, Ben Rosser <rosser.bjr(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Looking at the dist-git README further reinforces this impression. The
first sentence says: "DistGit (Distributed Git) is Git with additional
data storage". My initial reaction to that is "so, it is basically
just git". My second reaction is "why does additional data storage
somehow make git (a distributed version control system) even _more_
distributed?".
I might be misremembering, but I think Dist-Git was originally short
for "Distribution Git". It was the first attempt to marry a binary
store to Git, predating git-annex and Git LFS by several years.
Unlike VCSes like CVS and SVN, Git does not handle binaries very well,
and so they needed to be moved out of the VCS into an external store.
This was the first attempt at it, and it works, though no one else
ever adopted it due to some of the clunkiness with it (the undefined
sources file format, inability to cleanly define where the sources are
actually stored, etc.).
Those issues could probably be solved today, but I don't think anyone
really cares to fix that in a way where Dist-Git would integrate more
cleanly into Git itself.
--
真実はいつも一つ!/ Always, there's only one truth!