maishathasin / magit

minimal recreation of git

magit

This is my minimal recreation of git, currently supports creating a repository, adding files to staging, commiting, creating/switching branches, merging, log and diff. This is only used for learning puposes about the internals of git and is no way should be used for production.

How to use

Don't

Key differences b/w git and magit:

Staging Area

Git: Uses an 'index' file to track changes that are to be committed. This is a binary file that represents the state of the working directory.

Magit: Manages a 'staged' directory. Each file to be committed is stored here with its content hashed. It's more like a collection of files rather than a file.

This has been done for simplicity as git uses a tree structure which is a bit more complicated to implement.

Git's Tree Structure

Blob Objects: The contents of each file are stored as blob objects.

Tree Objects: Git uses "tree" objects to represent the structure of directories, it contains pointers to blob objects.

Commits Point to Trees: Each commit in Git points to a tree object

Magit's Approach

Direct Staging: when you add a file in magit, the content of the file is stored directly in the staged directory.

Commit Structure: the commit object itself stores the changes. This is different from Git wwhere a commit points to a tree object representing the repository's directory structure and changes Thus magits approach is not efficient for large file sizes

This has been only done for simplicity, as I am not going to implement remote tracking, tags.

Merging

Right now merging does not take into account for merge conflicts, nor does it fix divergent branches.

Todo:

• handle uncommited changes when switching branches
• rebase

Resources

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCtZWGhQBvo