Abstract
Version Control Systems, used by developers to keep track of the evolution of their code, model repositories as Merkle graphs of revisions. In order to synchronize efficiently between different instances of a repository, they need to determine the common knowledge that they share. This process is called discovery.In this paper, we provide theoretical definitions for the problem of discovery, establish some universal upper and lower bounds on the amount of data that needs to be exchanged, as well as NP-hardness for a restricted variant (with only 2 round-trips). We also present and analyze some algorithms that are used in extant VCSs, such as Mercurial and Git, and propose an algorithm based on chain-decomposition.
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