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McVoy claimed that it would take someone roughly 5 years to solve the problems that bitkeeper solved. Torvalds took a few weeks of break and did it. Granted git

McVoy claimed that it would take someone roughly 5 years to solve the problems that bitkeeper solved. Torvalds took a few weeks of break and did it. Granted git at that time was far removed from the feature set and polish it had after a few years. But considering how many times we have heard the "I can build this in a weekend of coding" trope, git is truly an exception weekend-project (+) that actually delivered on the promise. (+) - Taking vast liberties by stretching the weekend

vidarh 4y ago
It might well have been true(-ish) at the time McVoy did it. Problem is that a lot of these things are hard until you see a solution, but become fairly trivial or at least much simpler with even the smallest little hints at which part of the solution space is fruitful. If you want to monetise an idea like that you better build a lot of more amazing stuff around it to give people a reason to pay you. E.g. to do something like git you'd save a whole lot of effort the moment you know to consider a hierarchical store addressed by hash of contents from the whole repository down to individual files, and a list of the hash of the root of each revision (this description is already a refinement of the first iteration of how git stores trees, which apparently didn't use a hierarchical structure at first but just a list of files according to [1]). [1] https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/GitTreeEvolution https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/GitTreeEvoluti...