Repository

A location storing committed data. This can be shared between multiple branches.

Branch

A branch is a pointer into the revision graph and associated metadata.

• HEAD - A Revision_id corresponding to the tip of the branch.
• Repository - The data store where the revisions are. Either in same or parent directory.
• Other branch-specific information:
  • Associated branches
  • User configuration
  • Push/pull locations, etc.

Notes:

• Each branch is uniquely identified by URL (which may just be a local path).
• The history for a branch is linearized by walking the left-most parents of the revision graph starting at HEAD.

Working Tree

Files in a location that can be edited by the user. Always associated with a Branch, but may not be in the same location.

Revision

A revision is a marker for of a Tree and its associated metadata. Each revision is a record with the following fields:

• Revision_id - Unique identifier for this revision.
• Parents - A list of Revision_id's.
• Properties - A dictionary of metadata. Generally, the meta data is at least:
  • Committer - Who committed the revision.
  • Date - When the revision was committed
  • Timestamp
  • Message - Commit message
  • Timezone - What timezone the timestamp is relative to.

The DAG (directed acyclic graph) implied by the set of revisions is the revision graph of the project. (add here)

A Bazaar revision is equivalent to a git commit object.

Inventory

An inventory is literally a snapshot of the Tree for a particular revision. There is an Inventory for every Revision. The snapshot is represented as a list of (file_id, revision) tuples, defining the state of the text (i.e. contents of the file) for a particular revision. In detail, an Inventory is a series of records each with the following fields:

• File_id - Unique identifier for the file. Same for all revisions of the file.
• Revision - The Revision_id in which this variation of this file was introduced.
• Parent ID - File_id of the parent directory, or ROOT_ID.
• Name - The filename relative to the parent directory.
• Executable - Indicates that this file should be executable on systems that support it.
• Text SHA1 - SHA-1 hash of the full text of the file (not the delta).
• Text size - Size in bytes of the text of the file.

Notes:

• The reason there is a revision ID for each record in the inventory is for storing the state of files which did not change in this revision. The revision may point to an earlier Revision_id than the revision associated with this Inventory.
• The tree implied by the Parent ID fields is a directory tree, and is not related to the revision tree.
• This is similar to a Hg manifest.

Tree

Is more of an API, which is used as an interface managing the Inventory, and access to the actual texts of the files. (A WorkingTree or a RevisionTree.)

Alternatively, we could define Tree, and ignore the specifics of Inventory.

Revision_id

An arbitrary unqiue string which identifies a specific snaphot.

File_id

Rather than being defined soley by their path, files are uniquely identified by a file_id (arbitrary string). As files are moved and/or renamed, their file_id stays associated with the same logical file.

(Allows comparing 2 trees with arbitrary large history, and an arbitrary large number of renames, etc.)