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Quoting Linus Torvalds when asked how many files Git can handle during his Tech Talk at Google in 2007 (43:09):

…Git tracks your content. It never ever tracks a single file. You cannot track a file in Git. What you can do is you can track a project that has a single file, but if your project has a single file, sure do that and you can do it, but if you track 10,000 files, Git never ever sees those as individual files. Git thinks everything as the full content. All history in Git is based on the history of the whole project…

^{(Transcripts here.)}

Yet, when you dive into the Git book, the first thing you are told is that a file in Git can be either tracked or untracked. Furthermore, it seems to me like the whole Git experience is geared towards file versioning. When using git diff or git status output is presented on a per file basis. When using git add you also get to choose on a per file basis. You can even review history on a file basis and is lightning fast.

How should this statement be interpreted? In terms of file tracking, how is Git different from other source control systems, such as VCS?

In CVS, history was tracked on a per-file basis. A branch might consist of various files with their own various revisions, each with it's own version number. CVS was based off RCS, which tracked individual files in a similar way.

On the other hand, Git takes snapshots of the state of the whole project. Files are not tracked and versioned independently; a revision in the repository refers to a state of the whole project, not one file.

When Git refers to tracking a file, it means simply that it is to be included in the history of the project. Linus's talk was not referring to tracking files in the Git context, but was contrasting the CVS and RCS model with the snapshot-based model used in Git.

I agree with brian m. carlson's answer (and have upvoted it): Linus is indeed distinguishing, at least in part, between file-oriented and commit-oriented version control systems. But I think there is more to it than that.

In my book, which is stalled and might never get finished, I tried to come up with a taxonomy for version control systems. In my taxonomy the term for what we're interested here is the atomicity of the version control system. See what is currently page 22. When a VCS has file-level atomicity, there is in fact a history for each file. The VCS must remember the name of the file and what occurred to it at each point.

Git doesn't do that. Git has only a history of commits—the commit is its unit of atomicity, and the history is the set of commits in the repository. What a commit remembers is the data—a whole tree-full of file names and the contents that go with each of those files—plus some metadata: for instance, who made the commit, when, and why, and the internal Git hash ID of the commit's parent commit. (It is this parent, and the directed acycling graph formed by reading all commits and their parents, that is the history in a repository.)

Note that a VCS can be commit-oriented, yet still store data file-by-file. That's an implementation detail, though sometimes an important one, and Git does not do that either. Instead, each commit records a tree, with the tree object encoding file names, modes (i.e., is this file executable or not?), and a pointer to the actual file content. The content itself is stored independently, in a blob object. Like a commit object, a blob gets a hash ID that is unique to its content—but unlike a commit, which can only appear once, the blob can appear in many commits. So the underlying file content in Git is stored directly as a blob, and then indirectly in a tree object whose hash ID is recorded (directly or indirectly) in the commit object.

When you ask Git to show you a file's history using:

git log [--follow] [starting-point] [--] path/to/file

what Git is really doing is walking the commit history, which is the only history Git has, but not showing you any of these commits unless:

• the commit is a non-merge commit, and


• the parent of that commit also has the file, but the content in the parent differs, or the parent of the commit doesn't have the file at all

(but some of these conditions can be modified via additional git log options, and there's a very difficult to describe side effect called History Simplification that makes Git omit some commits from the history walk entirely). The file history you see here does not exactly exist in the repository, in some sense: instead, it's just a synthetic subset of the real history. You'll get a different "file history" if you use different git log options!