>> but none of them had an internal model that was as much of a hot mess as git's. > Git’s internal model is trivially simple: everything is stored as objects

>> but none of them had an internal model that was as much of a hot mess as git's. > Git’s internal model is trivially simple: everything is stored as objects addressed by content. These objects can point to each other. Additionally names can be associated with objects and which object a name points to can be updated. I'll do you one better: it's just some byte arrays on disk. I think the OP has a section that gets at some of the complexity of git's model: > The complexity of Git distracts attention from the software under development. A user of Git needs to keep all of the following in mind: > a. The working directory > b. The "index" or staging area > c. The local head > d. The local copy of the remote head > e. The actual remote head > Git has commands (and/or options on commands) for moving and comparing content between all of these locations.