/brz/remove-bazaar

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Inventories

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.. contents::

Overview

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Inventories provide an abstraction for talking about the shape of a tree.

Generally only tree object implementors should be concerned about inventories.

In memory inventories

=====================

In memory inventories are often used in diff and status operations between

trees. We are working to reduce the number of times this occurs with 'full

tree' inventory objects, and instead use more custom tailored data structures

that allow operations on only a small amount of data regardless of the size of

the tree.

Serialization

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There are several variants of serialised tree shape in use by bzr. To date

these have been mostly xml based, though plugins have offered non-xml versions.

dirstate

--------

The dirstate file in a working tree includes many different tree shapes - one

for the working tree and one for each parent tree, interleaved to allow

efficient diff and status operations.

xml

---

All the xml serialized forms write to and read from a single byte string, whose

hash is then the inventory validator for the commit object.

journalled

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The in development journalled inventory serializer generates a single byte

string during serialization, but may require many byte strings to deserialize,

and these are discovered recursively.