[account42]

> No rename support, it guesses

Git doesn't track changes yes, it tracks states. It has tools to compare those states but doesn't mean that it needs to track additional data to help those tools.

I'm unconvinced that tracking renames is really helpful as that is only the simplest case of of many possible state modifications. What if you split a file A into files B and C? You'd need to be able to track that too. Same for merging one file into another. And many many many more possible modifications. It makes sense to instead focus on the states and then improve the tools to compare them.

Tracking all kinds of changes also requires all development tools to be aware of your version control. You can no longer use standard tools to do mass renames and instead somehow build them on top of your vcs so it can track the operations. That's a huge tradeoff that tracking repository states doesn't have.

> submodules

I agree, neither submodules nor subtrees are ideal solutions.

[samus]

> What if you split a file A into files B and C? You'd need to be able to track that too. Same for merging one file into another. And many many many more possible modifications.

I suppose Bitkeeper can meaningfully deal with that since their data model drills down into the file contents.