This article brings back memories. Back in 2007, I had just watched Linus' presentation on Git at Google (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 http://www.

This article brings back memories. Back in 2007, I had just watched Linus' presentation on Git at Google (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8) where he called all non distributed version control systems as useless. I could not make any sense of the DVCS from his talk. I tried to play with Git and it was extremely frustrating due to the poor CLI. I thought may be Git is just a fad. But then more and more people kept talking about how awesome it is. This was one of the article where Git finally clicked for me. The key quote: There is no need for fancy metadata, rename tracking and so forth. The only thing you need to store is the state of the tree before and after each change. What files were renamed? Which ones were copied? Which ones were deleted? What lines were added? Which ones were removed? Which lines had changes made inside them? Which slabs of text were copied from one file to another? You shouldn't have to care about any of these questions and you certainly shouldn't have to keep special tracking data in order to help you answer them: all the changes to the tree (additions, deletes, renames, edits etc) are implicitly encoded in the delta between the two states of the tree; you just track what is the content. It's been 7 years since I have been using Git and I can't imagine how I ever worked with version control which didn't work on the entire tree.