6 ms·

Linus Torvalds's first public mention of git (2005)

80 points by jordigh 12y ago

jordigh 12y ago
And the Mercurial announcement: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0504.2/0670.html http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0504.2/0670.html Matt Mackall had been working on hg for a couple of weeks prior to the public announcement This means that both projects started at almost the same time. I believe that Matt actually privately showed Linus hg before he made a public announcement, but maybe I am mistaken about this story.
Pxtl 12y ago
> I bet you could make a reasonable SCM on top of it, though. Still waiting for that :)
- jordigh 12y ago
  There are projects like hgit and gitless that put a different UI over a git store, not to mention that just about every GUI tries to hide at least one of the "ugly" parts of the CLI.
- mojoe 12y ago
  I'm the 'git expert' at work, and someone sent me this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDeG4S-mJts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDeG4S-mJts
  - Pxtl 12y ago
    That so didn't need the cancer thing.
spb 12y ago
> Never mind merging. It's not an SCM, it's a distribution and archival mechanism. I bet you could make a reasonable SCM on top of it, though. Linus Torvalds really has a gift for under-promising: > I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. [...] > It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.
- wz1000 12y ago
  Much better than over-promising :P
- justicezyx 12y ago
  It's not underpromising, it's just being accurate. People are just indulged in the MBA shit-talk style so deeply...
- yason 12y ago
  That's simply so genuinely Finnish.
  - fapjacks 12y ago
    YES! Thanks for that. It's exactly the truth, and something I so sincerely appreciate about their (and more generally Scandinavian) culture.
chriscool 12y ago
The Git-Merge conference, April 8th & 9th in Paris, France will celebrate 10 years of Git: http://git-merge.com/ http://git-merge.com/
- jordigh 12y ago
  Any idea what precisely they're counting as the birth of git?
SilasX 12y ago
Out of curiosity, was anyone else surprised to learn when git first came out? I had been using it for a while, and assumed it had been around for ages, based on how it seemed to be so oriented around a unix file system and using the command line.
- Diederich 12y ago
  This was the first 'reasonable' to interface with git: http://git.or.cz/cogito/ http://git.or.cz/cogito/
- marktangotango 12y ago
  I remember reading about git and thinking "branching and merging in svn really isn't that hard, who needs this distributed versioning stuff?". But then I worked at what appears to have been one of the few companies on the planet that used svn correctly.
- pp19dd 12y ago
  I was- tried it on a private server, as you would, and didn't entirely get its utility at the time. My opinion is that great projects (products?) always have two outstanding versions: the CLI, and the GUI. Problem is that whoever makes the CLI can't make the GUI or they miss the point of what the GUI can offer that the CLI can't, and vice-versa.
- vlunkr 12y ago
  No, if it was that old my professors would have been using it.
- abc_lisper 12y ago
  Man. I should be getting old. I distinctly remember using Git for the first time. I remember learning that branches are first class entities in Git; learnt other cool stuff from it. For example git grep, it was so cool to see it that fast.
- tw04 12y ago
  The fact you're surprised makes me feel really, really old. I remember watching the initial conflict with popcorn in hand. I was more interested in OpenSolaris in those days, but it was still entertaining to see the pissing matches Linus caused as part of finding the new way.
ttctciyf 12y ago
Arguably, he's referring to (what would become) git in this earlier message in the same thread: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0504.0/1826.html http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0504.0/1826.html > So I'm writing some scripts to try to track things a whole lot faster. Initial indications are that I should be able to do it almost as quickly as I can just apply the patch, but quite frankly, I'm at most half done, and if I hit a snag maybe that's not true at all. Anyway, the reason I can do it quickly is that my scripts will _not_ be an SCM, they'll be a very specific "log Linus' state" kind of thing. That will make the linear patch merge a lot more time-efficient, and thus possible. The whole story of how git was cockled together to ameliorate the awkwardness of dealing with BitKeeper licensing (right?) issues, and marched from there to greatness is a pretty inspiring one, to my mind.
- jordigh 12y ago
  Oh, good catch. It's a very vague allusion to git, though. The one I linked was the first one where I could find the string "git" in it. > The whole story of how git was cockled together to ameliorate the awkwardness of dealing with BitKeeper licensing (right?) issues, and marched from there to greatness is a pretty inspiring one, to my mind. Let's not over-romanticise the subject. Github obviously had a lot to do with it, along with luck and admiration for Linus. Also, git is hardly alone: Mercurial was almost the same idea in the beginning. Let us not forget how early git only had branching by cloning, like the Bitkeeper that both git and hg were emulating. Also, it wasn't just that bitkeeper had an awkward license. It's that Tridgell reverse-engineered the Bitkeeper protocol, and thus Larry McVoy took away Linux's permissions to use Bitkeeper.
  - kinghajj 12y ago
    > It's that Tridgell reverse-engineered the Bitkeeper protocol I always thought it was weird how telnetting into a port and typing "help" was considered "reverse engineering".
    - jordigh 12y ago
      Hm, it was more than that. It involved inspecting network packets. What I found weird is how Linus blamed Tridgell for the reverse engineering: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/14/torvalds_attacks_tridgell/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/14/torvalds_attacks_tri...
Crito 12y ago
In case anybody hasn't tried it yet: It is pretty cool to check out the first copy of git that was committed to git. It is incredibly simple, yet was sufficient to create a commit that is still in the same git repo as modern git. https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23ca2e25604af290 https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23...
- xorcist 12y ago
  I love how it's equal parts code and animated gifs. Quite different from the initial reception at LKML. And says a lot about what it made possible, even if indirectly.
- scrollaway 12y ago
  This is interesting: https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23ca2e25604af290#diff-ca7628e295e2c5654dbdec183d70158dR94 https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23... A commit having multiple parents is not possible in git as of today. Change of mind?
  - alblue 12y ago
    It is possible for a git commit to have zero parents (initial commit), one parent (the direct ancestor in a linear path), two parents (generally referred to as a merge node) and more than two parents (also referred to as a merge but only possible using the octopus strategy).
    - scrollaway 12y ago
      Ah, of course, merge nodes have multiple parents. I had never heard of octopus merges though. It's fascinating. Here[1] is the article I read on it. [1] https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2015/01/git-merge-distinct-octopus-merge/ https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2015/01/git-merge-disti...
AceJohnny2 12y ago
I'm looking for a good collection of Linus' own emails discussing some of Git's more advanced topics, as I remember he discussed some subtleties that may be missed by other documentation such as the Pro Git book and the manpages. (maybe said documentation has caught up, but I'd like to check to be sure). So far, all I've found is a few threads collected at yarchive.net [1], which is promising, but how can I find more? Google fails me :( [1] http://yarchive.net/comp/index.html http://yarchive.net/comp/index.html search for "git"
- kasabali 12y ago
  I don't think you need to go much further than LKML archives. He wrote git because of the bitkeeper incidence and then handed over the maintainership very shortly after. There was also some mail about ranting when to rebase and when to merge more recently, but it is also in LKML. I don't think he regularly writes to other public lists than kernel anyway :)

80 points by jordigh 12y ago

And the Mercurial announcement: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0504.2/0670.html http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0504.2/0670.html Matt Mackall had been working on hg for a couple of weeks prior to the public announcement This means that both projects started at almost the same time. I believe that Matt actually privately showed Linus hg before he made a public announcement, but maybe I am mistaken about this story.

Pxtl 12y ago

> I bet you could make a reasonable SCM on top of it, though. Still waiting for that :)

jordigh 12y ago
There are projects like hgit and gitless that put a different UI over a git store, not to mention that just about every GUI tries to hide at least one of the "ugly" parts of the CLI.
mojoe 12y ago
I'm the 'git expert' at work, and someone sent me this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDeG4S-mJts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDeG4S-mJts
- Pxtl 12y ago
  That so didn't need the cancer thing.

spb 12y ago

> Never mind merging. It's not an SCM, it's a distribution and archival mechanism. I bet you could make a reasonable SCM on top of it, though. Linus Torvalds really has a gift for under-promising: > I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. [...] > It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.

wz1000 12y ago
Much better than over-promising :P
justicezyx 12y ago
It's not underpromising, it's just being accurate. People are just indulged in the MBA shit-talk style so deeply...
yason 12y ago
That's simply so genuinely Finnish.
- fapjacks 12y ago
  YES! Thanks for that. It's exactly the truth, and something I so sincerely appreciate about their (and more generally Scandinavian) culture.

chriscool 12y ago

The Git-Merge conference, April 8th & 9th in Paris, France will celebrate 10 years of Git: http://git-merge.com/ http://git-merge.com/

jordigh 12y ago
Any idea what precisely they're counting as the birth of git?

SilasX 12y ago

Out of curiosity, was anyone else surprised to learn when git first came out? I had been using it for a while, and assumed it had been around for ages, based on how it seemed to be so oriented around a unix file system and using the command line.

Diederich 12y ago
This was the first 'reasonable' to interface with git: http://git.or.cz/cogito/ http://git.or.cz/cogito/
marktangotango 12y ago
I remember reading about git and thinking "branching and merging in svn really isn't that hard, who needs this distributed versioning stuff?". But then I worked at what appears to have been one of the few companies on the planet that used svn correctly.
pp19dd 12y ago
I was- tried it on a private server, as you would, and didn't entirely get its utility at the time. My opinion is that great projects (products?) always have two outstanding versions: the CLI, and the GUI. Problem is that whoever makes the CLI can't make the GUI or they miss the point of what the GUI can offer that the CLI can't, and vice-versa.
vlunkr 12y ago
No, if it was that old my professors would have been using it.
abc_lisper 12y ago
Man. I should be getting old. I distinctly remember using Git for the first time. I remember learning that branches are first class entities in Git; learnt other cool stuff from it. For example git grep, it was so cool to see it that fast.
tw04 12y ago
The fact you're surprised makes me feel really, really old. I remember watching the initial conflict with popcorn in hand. I was more interested in OpenSolaris in those days, but it was still entertaining to see the pissing matches Linus caused as part of finding the new way.

ttctciyf 12y ago

Arguably, he's referring to (what would become) git in this earlier message in the same thread: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0504.0/1826.html http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0504.0/1826.html > So I'm writing some scripts to try to track things a whole lot faster. Initial indications are that I should be able to do it almost as quickly as I can just apply the patch, but quite frankly, I'm at most half done, and if I hit a snag maybe that's not true at all. Anyway, the reason I can do it quickly is that my scripts will _not_ be an SCM, they'll be a very specific "log Linus' state" kind of thing. That will make the linear patch merge a lot more time-efficient, and thus possible. The whole story of how git was cockled together to ameliorate the awkwardness of dealing with BitKeeper licensing (right?) issues, and marched from there to greatness is a pretty inspiring one, to my mind.

jordigh 12y ago
Oh, good catch. It's a very vague allusion to git, though. The one I linked was the first one where I could find the string "git" in it. > The whole story of how git was cockled together to ameliorate the awkwardness of dealing with BitKeeper licensing (right?) issues, and marched from there to greatness is a pretty inspiring one, to my mind. Let's not over-romanticise the subject. Github obviously had a lot to do with it, along with luck and admiration for Linus. Also, git is hardly alone: Mercurial was almost the same idea in the beginning. Let us not forget how early git only had branching by cloning, like the Bitkeeper that both git and hg were emulating. Also, it wasn't just that bitkeeper had an awkward license. It's that Tridgell reverse-engineered the Bitkeeper protocol, and thus Larry McVoy took away Linux's permissions to use Bitkeeper.
- kinghajj 12y ago
  > It's that Tridgell reverse-engineered the Bitkeeper protocol I always thought it was weird how telnetting into a port and typing "help" was considered "reverse engineering".
  - jordigh 12y ago
    Hm, it was more than that. It involved inspecting network packets. What I found weird is how Linus blamed Tridgell for the reverse engineering: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/14/torvalds_attacks_tridgell/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/14/torvalds_attacks_tri...

Crito 12y ago

In case anybody hasn't tried it yet: It is pretty cool to check out the first copy of git that was committed to git. It is incredibly simple, yet was sufficient to create a commit that is still in the same git repo as modern git. https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23ca2e25604af290 https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23...

xorcist 12y ago
I love how it's equal parts code and animated gifs. Quite different from the initial reception at LKML. And says a lot about what it made possible, even if indirectly.
scrollaway 12y ago
This is interesting: https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23ca2e25604af290#diff-ca7628e295e2c5654dbdec183d70158dR94 https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23... A commit having multiple parents is not possible in git as of today. Change of mind?
- alblue 12y ago
  It is possible for a git commit to have zero parents (initial commit), one parent (the direct ancestor in a linear path), two parents (generally referred to as a merge node) and more than two parents (also referred to as a merge but only possible using the octopus strategy).
  - scrollaway 12y ago
    Ah, of course, merge nodes have multiple parents. I had never heard of octopus merges though. It's fascinating. Here[1] is the article I read on it. [1] https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2015/01/git-merge-distinct-octopus-merge/ https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2015/01/git-merge-disti...

AceJohnny2 12y ago

I'm looking for a good collection of Linus' own emails discussing some of Git's more advanced topics, as I remember he discussed some subtleties that may be missed by other documentation such as the Pro Git book and the manpages. (maybe said documentation has caught up, but I'd like to check to be sure). So far, all I've found is a few threads collected at yarchive.net [1], which is promising, but how can I find more? Google fails me :( [1] http://yarchive.net/comp/index.html http://yarchive.net/comp/index.html search for "git"

kasabali 12y ago
I don't think you need to go much further than LKML archives. He wrote git because of the bitkeeper incidence and then handed over the maintainership very shortly after. There was also some mail about ranting when to rebase and when to merge more recently, but it is also in LKML. I don't think he regularly writes to other public lists than kernel anyway :)