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People forget this, but even though git was developed for programming version control, there isn't a lot that makes it useful strictly for programming only. Gi

People forget this, but even though git was developed for programming version control, there isn't a lot that makes it useful strictly for programming only. Git is a powerful version control and collaboration system for any plain text (or maybe even binary) files. There's nothing special about programmers that makes it so they are the only ones that can learn about these tools and use them. With something like TortoiseGit (or Github's app) I can totally see people you would never expect start taking advantage of this. Authors, mathematicians, research agents, cartographers, government agents (all those legal documents need version control badly), lawyers, etc. As the world trusts computers with more and more of their files, they might start picking up the tools that programmers have held so dear. Why not empower them?

derleth 13y ago
Torvalds, in classic Unix hacker fashion, designed git to be so stupid it doesn't care what it's being used for, which goes quite a long way to making it all things to all people. Similar is how the Linux filesystem code flatly refuses to care about what encoding scheme filenames use as long as the byte 0x2F (ASCII '/') is only used to separate pathname components, the byte sequences 0x2E (".") and 0x2E 0x2E ("..") appearing alone in a component are special, and the byte 0x00 (ASCII nul) is only used to terminate the entire pathname. The kernel is so stupid it only sees byte sequences and only cares about those specific values and sequences; as a direct result, users can use any character encoding which guarantees those values will only be used for their respective purposes, and rely on easily-configurable applications to sort it out. Here's Torvalds, Viro, and Ts'o chewing out someone who thought the kernel should enforce UTF-8 file and directory names: http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/utf8.html http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/utf8.html
- rmc 13y ago
  I thought ".." was a hardlink to the parent directory created when a directory was created? Hence the kernel doesn't actually have to treat ".." as anything special, since, due to hardlinks, "it'll all work out"?
  - asperous 13y ago
    I hope not, that'd be such a waste
  - derleth 13y ago
    I think the point is that the character encoding scheme can't use "." or ".." for its own purposes because they already have meaning due to filesystem conventions.

derleth 13y ago

Torvalds, in classic Unix hacker fashion, designed git to be so stupid it doesn't care what it's being used for, which goes quite a long way to making it all things to all people. Similar is how the Linux filesystem code flatly refuses to care about what encoding scheme filenames use as long as the byte 0x2F (ASCII '/') is only used to separate pathname components, the byte sequences 0x2E (".") and 0x2E 0x2E ("..") appearing alone in a component are special, and the byte 0x00 (ASCII nul) is only used to terminate the entire pathname. The kernel is so stupid it only sees byte sequences and only cares about those specific values and sequences; as a direct result, users can use any character encoding which guarantees those values will only be used for their respective purposes, and rely on easily-configurable applications to sort it out. Here's Torvalds, Viro, and Ts'o chewing out someone who thought the kernel should enforce UTF-8 file and directory names: http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/utf8.html http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/utf8.html

rmc 13y ago
I thought ".." was a hardlink to the parent directory created when a directory was created? Hence the kernel doesn't actually have to treat ".." as anything special, since, due to hardlinks, "it'll all work out"?
- asperous 13y ago
  I hope not, that'd be such a waste
- derleth 13y ago
  I think the point is that the character encoding scheme can't use "." or ".." for its own purposes because they already have meaning due to filesystem conventions.