Filesystem structure question

I read the libsvn_fs structure document yesterday (which I believe Ben
has been updating, so I think it's reasonably current), and am unclear
about the motivation behind hierarchical node-revision IDs.

What would fail if we threw out the concept of "nodes" and dealt only
in terms of node-revisions? (Perhaps they'd get a simpler name, but
I'll continue to use the term "node-revision" for consistency.) A
node-revision would have a simple numeric ID.

I'm guessing that I'm missing something having to do with the storage
of node-revision contents as deltas. But I'm not sure why we can't
just allow the contents of a node-revision to be ("delta" RELATIVE-TO
DELTA CHECKSUM) where RELATIVE-TO is another node-revision-id, instead
of having a "younger" which is implicitly relative to the next-younger
revision.

Thanks for indulging me.
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:16 2006