Re: The Gnus repository is switching to Git as of 2010-04-19

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 02:59, Teemu Likonen <address@hidden> wrote:
> * 2010-04-20 15:05 (-0500), Ted Zlatanov wrote:
>
>> Git doesn't really do renames, but "git diff" will detect them if the
>> deleted and the new file have the same content.
>
> Not quite. Git will detect renames if at least 50% of file's content
> remains the same. So, you can also modify files quite much unless the
> renamed-modified file is not very small.

Not quite :)

At a very basic level Git just doesn't care. It just snapshots content
from one revision to the next. It really is just "A Stupid Content
Tracker".

Rename detection is all done at the higher level by the Git porcelain.
The 50% number you cited can be changed to anything you want by giving
the diff commands the -B$PERCENT argument. See gitdiffcore(7).

You could easily write your own rename tracking on top of Git that did
something completely different. Like do rename detection on binary
files, or on text in TIFF files based on how those files come through
OCR scanning.