> If your "one overriding idea" is wrong, then certainly that'll get you into trouble, but as history demonstrates, they aren't always wrong. I don't think tha

> If your "one overriding idea" is wrong, then certainly that'll get you into trouble, but as history demonstrates, they aren't always wrong. I don't think that even Linus is opposed to One Big Idea when it works. Take his Git, for instance. At the core, it's pretty much just this: 1. File data goes in blobs named by their checksum. 2. Directories are trees that have a bunch of name-checksum pairs for files, and references to other trees. Trees are named by their checksum too. 3. Commits are named by their checksum too. (Notice a theme?) They refer to their toplevel tree and their parent commits: zero for a root commit, one for a normal commit, or more for a merge. Everything else is built on top of that. Making a distributed VCS on top of that was just adding features to get commits (and the objects at which they point) between machines. Tags are just named pointers to a commit. Branches are just tags that get reassigned when you make a new commit to the tip of a branch.