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10 Years of Git: An Interview With Linus Torvalds
LibbyMC writes Git will celebrate its 10-year anniversary tomorrow. To celebrate this milestone, Linus shares the behind-the-scenes story of Git and tells us what he thinks of the project and its impact on software development. From the article: "Ten years ago this week, the Linux kernel community faced a daunting challenge: They could no longer use their revision control system BitKeeper and no other Software Configuration Management (SCMs) met their needs for a distributed system. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, took the challenge into his own hands and disappeared over the weekend to emerge the following week with Git. Today Git is used for thousands of projects and has ushered in a new level of social coding among programmers."
Its true, git is complex like Linux is - it suits the needs to Torvalds, but I think its popularity exceeds its ability, and many people use it without using it properly - for example a previous company I worked for used git for their SCM and I asked where the backups were I was told they didn't need backups because it was distributed and everyone had a copy of the repo... of course, that relies on everyone having a copy of each repo, or at least 1 other person having an up-to-date copy of each repo which wasn't the case. This kind of thinking wouldn't happen if there was more of a concept of distributed-but-from-a-central-repo. It needs the concept of a golden root from where everything else is sourced (and I know you can have this, but its more convention due to the distributed nature)
Still, it ushered in a new style of version control that wasn't catered for before.
Now we're seeing easier, more accessible systems, such as fossil by that attempts to bridge the gap between DVCS freedoms and centralised repositories and includes other useful features such as bugtracker in the SCM and still geared towards branches that are more collaborative than gits 'private playground' branches. (ie git is designed for people to work on their own and hopefully merge changes back, many other SCMs are designed for branches that are for common code worked on by several people and thus requiring less merging). Git works well because of how the Linux project is structured - a very large hierarchy, but starts to fall down in a small team where people don't have that arms-length working environment, or where they work on multiple branches at the same time (eg at work, I have my big feature and I have bug fixes that come and go regularly - git doesn't help in that environment unless I have multiple repos checked out)
You have to understand the data-structure, how files, directories and commits are all content-addressable objects. The linkage of the commits by means of their id's must be understood.
Git: the best file system anybody ever confused with a version control system. :-)