Version control tools are more like cars than clocks.
Clock users have no need to know how a clock works behind the dials. We just want to know what time it is. Those who understand the inner workings of a clock can’t tell time any more skillfully than the rest of us.
Version control tools are more like cars. Lots of people, including me, use cars without knowing much about how they work. However, people who really understand cars tend to get better performance out of them.
This chapter could be a whole book of its own—I am not giving a comprehensive treatment of how distributed version control tools work. I’ll just offer a few highlights that I think are worth knowing:
I’ll use Git to discuss cryptographic hashes.
I’ll use Mercurial to discuss deltified storage.
I’ll use Veracity to discuss DAGs and blob storage. Plus a brief discussion of its decentralized database.
First, let’s talk briefly about the concept of a delta.