The awesomeness of no rename

git does not store renames. All it does is store each version of the whole tree of the managed project. The diff and merge tools are those that look at the trees and file contents and notice that a file has been renamed.

For example, I had a project where a program was converted to C++, piecewise. One file was originally foo.c, then foo.cpp was created by copying and fixing the original C source. foo.c was not removed until later, so for a few commits both existed simultaneously. Indeed this was in CVS, and I just imported the stuff to git, to work on newer stuff there.

Now it was time to merge the line originating in CVS into the work branch. git merge just looked at the changes that needed to be merged all at once, and saw that foo.c was gone and foo.cpp was new over that stretch, and that they were 95% similar, so it assumed this was a rename, and properly merged the rename into the work branch.

That is the power of not doing or saving renames.