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10 Years of Git: An Interview With Linus Torvalds

Posted by samzenpus on from the straight-from-the-horses-mouth dept.

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."

4 of 203 comments (clear)

  1. Re:And yet, no one understands Git. by jones_supa · · Score: 5, Informative

    It isn't complicated. Check out Git - The Simple Guide.

  2. Like Coca Cola, git is the real thing by Johnny+Loves+Linux · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As a software developer who's been a git user for 7 years, I don't know how I could have written any serious code without git. Branching and merging is trivial. Cloning is trivial. The staging area makes choosing what to commit trivial. git rebase makes life much easier when it comes to reordering/editing/removing commits out of the history. git blame --- such a nice tool. Binary searching to find bugs is trivial. Every git tool is documented to within an inch of its life.

    And the icing on the cake? Code cowboy hates git. Like sunlight or garlic to a vampire, Code cowboy abhors git. He can't hold the source code hostage to his every brain damaged whim. He can't hose anybody with a distributed version control system. It's no wonder why Code Cowboy is always yapping away at git -- he can't show off his genius if his code can be ignored.

  3. this is really a story about.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    how bitkeeper fucked up and was swiftly relegated to irrelevance... you have to wonder how many of these are even still using bk......

  4. Re:And yet, no one understands Git. by Guy+Harris · · Score: 5, Funny

    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. :-)