Sure. And git very much on purpose made all basic data structures be text.
I'm a UNIX weenie, not some VMS hack. Fixed-sized records are evil.
[ Yes, I made the hashes fixed-size binary blobs in the tree object. In
retrospect, that was probably a mistake. Not a huge one, but it's one of
the few things in the basic data structure that I'm sorry for. It
seemed to make sense at the time. ]
I do like how you can have arbitrary parenthood (well, arbitrary on a
data structure level - we do restrict it in practice). Maybe it's not a
hugely important thing, but it does allow more than just plain merges.
IOW, I could well imagine having an extra parent pointer that is not a
"data merge" pointer, but a "concept merge" - you could have branches that
have commits that point back to not the data in the tree, but to
particular commits in another branch.
One of the things I could imagine using git for is to have "annotation
branches" for things like code review etc. They'd be a real branch in
their own right and with their own history, but at the same time they
could well want to point back to the "code branch" that they annotate by
considering that another parent in a "non-data merge" (and yes, you'd
obviously have to use a special merge strategy for things like that, but
you'd likely integrate it in some "annotation tool chain" rather than
anything else).
Linus
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