[mtdewcmu]

I agree that git is both a great advance and seems fundamentally broken at the same time. One of git's advances is that it treats commits as snapshots of the entire tree rather than diffs[1]. A snapshot might as well be a tarball of the whole directory, except that git uses references to previous snapshots to store it efficiently. So in this aspect, git is like a backup tool plus compression. It's not quite a useful tool just for making compressed backups of source code, though, because data is buried in opaque internal files in the .git directory and can't be untangled from the commit history. You can't get at your data without going through git's tools, which means you might need to make your own backups in case git goes insane, and you can't use the backup functionality without creating indelible history.

I'm thinking that the repository could be moved out of the working directory and placed in its own file that's not invisible. If the repo was reified into a visible file, then repos would be portable and you could ftp them. The backup functionality could be separated from the history-tracking functionality, so you could make backups freely without adding noise to the commit history. A backup would basically be a tarball that you could append to a repo file, taking advantage of previous entries for compression. Commits, however they were implemented, could reference snapshots, but they needn't be 1:1.

[1] http://git-scm.com/book/ch1-3.html

[eru]

> I'm thinking that the repository could be moved out of the working directory and placed in its own file that's not invisible.

Symlinks are your friends.

> then repos would be portable and you could ftp them.

tar might come in handy.

> The backup functionality could be separated from the history-tracking functionality, so you could make backups freely without adding noise to the commit history. A backup would basically be a tarball that you could append to a repo file, taking advantage of previous entries for compression.

You can already do this. You can have commits without ancestors or descendants in your repository, and they will still benefit from delta compression.

[mtdewcmu]

The idea is to make it less monolithic. I'm digging more into the inner workings of git now. The functionality might already be in there, just not obvious.