Aske Olsson

Git is different; instead of the regular file and patches list, Git records a snapshot of all the files tracked by Git and their paths relative to the repository root, that is, the files tracked by Git in the file system tree.

The way Git references the files and directories it tracks is directly built into the data model.

Git's object storage is a key-value storage, the key being the ID of the object and the value being the object itself. The key is an SHA-1 hash of the object, with some additional information such as size.