user-manual: reorder commit, blob, tree discussion

The bottom-up blog, tree, commit order makes sense unless you want to
give explicit examples--it's easier to discover objects to examine if
you go in the other order....,

Signed-off-by: J. Bruce Fields <bfields@citi.umich.edu>
This commit is contained in:
J. Bruce Fields 2007-08-31 23:26:38 -04:00
parent 1c097891e4
commit 513d419c59

View File

@ -2766,27 +2766,32 @@ signature.
The object types in some more detail:
[[blob-object]]
Blob Object
~~~~~~~~~~~
[[commit-object]]
Commit Object
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A "blob" object is nothing but a binary blob of data, and doesn't
refer to anything else. There is no signature or any other
verification of the data, so while the object is consistent (it 'is'
indexed by its sha1 hash, so the data itself is certainly correct), it
has absolutely no other attributes. No name associations, no
permissions. It is purely a blob of data (i.e. normally "file
contents").
The "commit" object is an object that introduces the notion of
history into the picture. In contrast to the other objects, it
doesn't just describe the physical state of a tree, it describes how
we got there, and why.
In particular, since the blob is entirely defined by its data, if two
files in a directory tree (or in multiple different versions of the
repository) have the same contents, they will share the same blob
object. The object is totally independent of its location in the
directory tree, and renaming a file does not change the object that
file is associated with in any way.
A "commit" is defined by the tree-object that it results in, the
parent commits (zero, one or more) that led up to that point, and a
comment on what happened. Again, a commit is not trusted per se:
the contents are well-defined and "safe" due to the cryptographically
strong signatures at all levels, but there is no reason to believe
that the tree is "good" or that the merge information makes sense.
The parents do not have to actually have any relationship with the
result, for example.
A blob is typically created when gitlink:git-update-index[1]
is run, and its data can be accessed by gitlink:git-cat-file[1].
Note on commits: unlike some SCM's, commits do not contain
rename information or file mode change information. All of that is
implicit in the trees involved (the result tree, and the result trees
of the parents), and describing that makes no sense in this idiotic
file manager.
A commit is created with gitlink:git-commit-tree[1] and
its data can be accessed by gitlink:git-cat-file[1].
[[tree-object]]
Tree Object
@ -2830,32 +2835,27 @@ A tree is created with gitlink:git-write-tree[1] and
its data can be accessed by gitlink:git-ls-tree[1].
Two trees can be compared with gitlink:git-diff-tree[1].
[[commit-object]]
Commit Object
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[[blob-object]]
Blob Object
~~~~~~~~~~~
The "commit" object is an object that introduces the notion of
history into the picture. In contrast to the other objects, it
doesn't just describe the physical state of a tree, it describes how
we got there, and why.
A "blob" object is nothing but a binary blob of data, and doesn't
refer to anything else. There is no signature or any other
verification of the data, so while the object is consistent (it 'is'
indexed by its sha1 hash, so the data itself is certainly correct), it
has absolutely no other attributes. No name associations, no
permissions. It is purely a blob of data (i.e. normally "file
contents").
A "commit" is defined by the tree-object that it results in, the
parent commits (zero, one or more) that led up to that point, and a
comment on what happened. Again, a commit is not trusted per se:
the contents are well-defined and "safe" due to the cryptographically
strong signatures at all levels, but there is no reason to believe
that the tree is "good" or that the merge information makes sense.
The parents do not have to actually have any relationship with the
result, for example.
In particular, since the blob is entirely defined by its data, if two
files in a directory tree (or in multiple different versions of the
repository) have the same contents, they will share the same blob
object. The object is totally independent of its location in the
directory tree, and renaming a file does not change the object that
file is associated with in any way.
Note on commits: unlike some SCM's, commits do not contain
rename information or file mode change information. All of that is
implicit in the trees involved (the result tree, and the result trees
of the parents), and describing that makes no sense in this idiotic
file manager.
A commit is created with gitlink:git-commit-tree[1] and
its data can be accessed by gitlink:git-cat-file[1].
A blob is typically created when gitlink:git-update-index[1]
is run, and its data can be accessed by gitlink:git-cat-file[1].
[[trust]]
Trust