GM!
Just a short note describing a recent new project of mine, git merkle (gm)!
gm is a recursive tree of all the repos I’ve worked on since 2017 after a little spring cleaning; I removed about 40% of my pre-existing github repo history in the process of writing gm. There are about 90 repos contained in gm, and counting. I removed about 60.
Why did you do this?!
This is a very real question. Organizing and cleaning up about 6 years of git history, plus writing a script to keep them organized going forward, took about 6 hours across two days. Submodules are somewhat infamously finicky, and the last thing I want to be doing is managing merge conflicts on a nested tree of my commit history.
That is, if a commit is made to a submodule at depth $d$ in the tree, say in my repo helix, for which the path is gm/linux/.files/helix, then $d$ new commits are added to the git-merkle tree.[1]
I have a few reasons. One is that it’s very nice to have a copy of the full history of my work on hand to ripgrep through. Another is that it’s a nice way to keep my work presentable for others. But most especially, this is one representation of all the work I’ve done for the last 6 years, and I’m proud of it. This repo is a sort of monument to the pride I feel in the all the work I’ve done. As a cryptography engineer, I find it apropos to represent that work as the workhorse data structure of blockchain cryptography, the merkle tree.
GM.
root = h(n1, n2)
| \
n1=h(n3,n4) n2=h(n5,n6)
| | | |
n3 n4 n5 n6
a merkle tree where the leaves are where data is stored and the root is a single hash
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For those of you who are rusty on cryptographic data structures 101, a merkle tree is a tree data structure where the leaves contain the data, and every intermediate node is the hash of it’s leaves, see above. It’s useful for committing to a bunch of data in a single hash (256 bytes), that cryptographically represents the compressed state of the entire set of data, even if there’s a ton of data. Each git commit is produces the hash of the state of the repo, so the submodule tree is a just a tree of commit hashes.