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Software Linux

Torvalds Unveils New Linux Control System 527

BlakeCaldwell writes "CNet reports: 'Linux founder and leader Linus Torvalds has launched a new tool, called Git, to manage his software project, after a dispute led him to drop the previous system.' He will start using Git instead of BitKeeper to control the flow of updates and track changes in the kernel." We've covered this previously. Relatedly, ChocLinux writes "Jeremy Allison, who wrote Samba with Andrew 'Tridge' Tridgell, is sticking up for his friend in the row over BitKeeper. "
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Torvalds Unveils New Linux Control System

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  • how come (Score:3, Insightful)

    by phreakv6 ( 760152 ) <phreakv6@gmCOLAail.com minus caffeine> on Thursday April 21, 2005 @08:52AM (#12301609) Homepage
    how come this wasnt even an option in the current poll here. let the replies like "welcome to /. flow"
  • Git? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by YrWrstNtmr ( 564987 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @08:52AM (#12301611)
    Isn't that a bit of a disparaging name in English as it is spoken in the Olde Country?

    As in "You daft git!"

    • Linus got the name from Tridge's response to McVoy.
    • Re:Git? (Score:5, Informative)

      by PeterBrett ( 780946 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @08:55AM (#12301642) Homepage

      Yes, that's right; from the git README [ehlo.org]:

      "git" can mean anything, depending on your mood.

      - random three-letter combination that is pronounceable, and not
      actually used by any common UNIX command. The fact that it is a
      mispronounciation of "get" may or may not be relevant.
      - stupid. contemptible and despicable. simple. Take your pick from the
      dictionary of slang.
      - "global information tracker": you're in a good mood, and it actually
      works for you. Angels sing, and a light suddenly fills the room.
      - "goddamn idiotic truckload of sh*t": when it breaks
      • Re:Git? (Score:3, Funny)

        by hawk ( 1151 )

        - random three-letter combination that is pronounceable, and not actually used by any common UNIX command.

        Well, *duh*!

        Self respecting unix commands have two letters, noto three, and, furthemore, are not pronounceable.

        That mkdir and rmdir use more than two letters is a long-standing bug--longer even than the screwy footnote/gap bug in words (which dates to Mac Word 1.0)

        hawk
        • Re:Git? (Score:3, Funny)

          by GoRK ( 10018 )
          That mkdir and rmdir use more than two letters is a long-standing bug--longer even than the screwy footnote/gap bug in words (which dates to Mac Word 1.0)

          A bug which was fixed by DOS!
      • Re:Git? (Score:5, Funny)

        by mattspammail ( 828219 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @11:47AM (#12303061)
        How about "Git Isn't Translatable"?
    • Re:Git? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Saunalainen ( 627977 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @08:57AM (#12301646)
      Indeed - Linus has already explained [idg.com.au] the reasoning behind this name.
      • Re:Git? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Striikerr ( 798526 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:22AM (#12301799)
        And if you're too lazy to RTF, here's the quote from the very end of the article.. "When asked why he called the new software, "git," British slang meaning "a rotten person," he said. "I'm an egotistical bastard, so I name all my projects after myself. First Linux, now git.""
        • Re:Git? (Score:3, Funny)

          by ewe2 ( 47163 )
          It should have been called 'dickhead' then, much more appropriate and has an Australian air to it.
    • Isn't that a bit of a disparaging name in English as it is spoken in the Olde Country?

      Yes.

      Linus using it despite/becuase of this is typical of his sense of humour. From TFA:
      Torvalds recognizes Git isn't flawless: "I'm proud of Git, but let's face it, it definitely has some rough edges.
    • Re:Git? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Arathrael ( 742381 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:01AM (#12301673)
      It sure is, I believe it's derived from the Scottish term get, usually used to refer to an illegitimate child. 'Git' itself is used more broadly though, in much the same way as 'bastard' is.
    • Re:Git? (Score:2, Funny)

      by ch-chuck ( 9622 )
      that's what we appalachains holler at city slickers that'ar trespassing, usually spoken while holding a shotgun.
  • zdnet.co.uk (Score:5, Informative)

    by fish34 ( 636162 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @08:52AM (#12301612)
    What an awful zdnet article, "But now it seems that some open source developers haven't kept up their end of the bargain. " Tridge wasn't bound the by the license. "Tridgell's decision to reverse-engineering Bitkeeper. The resulting clone would violate BitMover's intellectual property -- something McVoy wasn't going to sit back and watch happen." Again, no, it wouldn't. My understanding is that reverse engineering for interoperability is legally fine. Think of Samba..
    • Re:zdnet.co.uk (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:07AM (#12301713)
      Tridge didn't even reverse engineer Bitkeeper, he was just trying to reverse engineer the *file format* to prevent vendor lockin.

      The Linux kernel history was being held hostage to Bitkeeper's good graces. If the business reasons for letting kernel developers do advertisement and Beta testing disappeared, the free version would inevitably disappear and kernel developers would be SOL (as they are now).

      If it weren't for the foresight to mirror *some* of the BitKeeper information in CVS, the kernel developers would have no developement history other than what they can dig up in the archives.

    • Re:zdnet.co.uk (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Naikrovek ( 667 ) <jjohnson@ps g . com> on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:23AM (#12301815)
      His "reverse engineering" was this:

      telnet bitkeepermachine
      HELP
      --seeing the list of available commands--
      clone filename.c

      seeing a bunch of garbage, then shortening it to:

      echo "clone filename.c" | telnet bitkeepermachine > filename.c

      wow that's what I call reverse engineering!
    • Re:zdnet.co.uk (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Krehbiel ( 708327 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:50AM (#12301988)
      My understanding is that reverse engineering for interoperability is legally fine.

      Reverse-engineering for interoperability is legally fine, unless you're bound by a license not to do it. Those who've accepted the free BitKeeper client (or who bought BitKeeper) are subject to just such a license.

      If Tridgell never acceted the BitKeeper license, then he's not bound by it, and there's nothing illegal about what he did. But you know, you don't have to do something illegal to piss people off. :-(

      McVoy got pissed that someone did what he didn't want anyone to do, so he decided to stop maintaining the free BK client. (He's also trying to say that Tridgell should have been subject to the BitKeeper license, since he happens to be a contractor doing some work for a company that had accepted the BK license. I don't buy that one.)

      Torvalds got mad that something somebody got McVoy mad, so that now his choice source control tool isn't freely available anymore. He ranted against Tridgell, but that's misplaced, I think. Torvalds isn't fully into the "Free Software" philosophy (despite his use of the GPL for Linux), and so doesn't see any value in Tridgell's work and calls it "evil."

    • Re:zdnet.co.uk (Score:3, Informative)

      by DrSkwid ( 118965 )
      not so hard to reverse engineer [theregister.co.uk]

      telnet bitkeeper 5000
      Connected to bitkeeper.
      Escape character is '^]'.
      help

  • Git? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Phidoux ( 705500 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @08:52AM (#12301615) Homepage
    I thought that's what Southerners say to their dawgs?
  • by qwertphobia ( 825473 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @08:53AM (#12301620)
    git 'er done!
  • by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @08:53AM (#12301623)
    maybe the kernel programmers should take 2 weeks and fix the basic flaws of git, like the business of not storing deltas to files
    • ..like the business of not storing deltas to files

      Actually, that's a feature. One of Linus' main objections to existing SCMs was that they're too slow -- and most of that sluggishness comes from the time necessary to calculate and resolve deltas in the ubiquitous RCS files.

      As far as I can tell, it's actually working pretty well so far.

      • I don't think anyone should expect Git to go out and win the SCM war, and be the one tool to version them all. It is a specific tool, made for a specific group of people, who have very specific needs. Regardless of how one feels about McVoy, I think he got it right when he said that Linus solved the 5% of the problem he needed solving. So Git may get some traction with other highly distributed, patch heavy projects. In the mean time there are plenty of options for the 99% of the rest of us
      • by bilgebag ( 102479 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:38AM (#12301903) Journal
        ..like the business of not storing deltas to files


        Actually, that's a feature. One of Linus' main objections to existing SCMs was that they're too slow -- and most of that sluggishness comes from the time necessary to calculate and resolve deltas in the ubiquitous RCS files.


        Obviously what needs to be taken into account is that is isn't necessary to do the delta creation at the point of check-in etc, a background process could promote 'clone' type mods into 'delta' type mods at its leisure, maybe even with a delay so only patches unlikely to get reverted are folded down to delta format.

        That way the workload gets distributed as well as the actual development.
    • Someone's already written a version that supports deltas. The issue is that the deltas are each the size of the complete file, because in most filesystems a file's size is rounded up to a 4K block. So if you have a 7K source file and you change it, storing the whole thing compressed is 4K, and storing a delta is also 4K, plus you need the old version of the file to apply the delta to.

      Additionally, using deltas means that if you want to combine two commits, you need to create a new representation of the fil
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 21, 2005 @08:54AM (#12301631)
    I guess this is the logical place to note the newest Groklaw story, Tridge Speaks [groklaw.net] where Tridge tells his side of the story, or at least a brief overview from his perspective.
  • by Carl ( 12719 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @08:54AM (#12301634) Homepage
    The monotone hackers have the same design as this new git tool. They already adapted their visualisation tools to make pretty screenshots of the kernel patches development history: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/monotone-devel/2 005-04/msg00183.html [gnu.org]
    • Yes, and the Kernel developers looked at monotone as the tool that best suited their development model. However it was way too slow. Hopefully monotone and git will learn from each other and the result will be a better faster open-source distributed SCM.

      I think Larry is going to be unhappy with the end result, because by cutting off the kernel developers he is triggering a lot of work on development of open SCM tools.

      • by Svartalf ( 2997 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @10:18AM (#12302206) Homepage
        I'd say that they are. In fact, several SCM tools are looking at what Linus has been doing with git and are giving the stuff due consideration (ARCH is going to pull all the "good" ideas coming from this- I think several other SCM projects are going to do the same...).

        Yeah, I think Larry just stepped in a hornet's nest here- my only complaint about the whole thing is Linus' going on and on about bad ideas, etc. The only bad idea that was going on was his use of BitKeeper in the first place.
        • I'd go as far as to say that really Linus has been irresponsible here by starting Git.

          Git is a hack to suit his needs, which is fine. But Git is pulling in all this publicity and development time from other people - there is basically a team of developers hacking on this hack of an SCM while more proven and mature solution (years in the making) which are only a little bit of dedication away from being ready to host a project as large as Linux are struggling to accomodate Git rather than focus on their (fe
    • by Bombcar ( 16057 ) <racbmob@@@bombcar...com> on Thursday April 21, 2005 @11:03AM (#12302616) Homepage Journal
      Heh. A quote:


      And rsync takes care of the network replication.


      So git, which had to be written because of something Tridge did, uses one of Tridge's programs. Whee!
  • What GIT Means. (Score:4, Informative)

    by chkorn ( 799133 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @08:57AM (#12301647) Homepage
    Linus definition of GIT:
    "git" can mean anything, depending on your mood. - random three-letter combination that is pronounceable, and not actually used by any common UNIX command. The fact that it is a mispronounciation of "get" may or may not be relevant. - stupid. contemptible and despicable. simple. Take your pick from the dictionary of slang. - "global information tracker": you're in a good mood, and it actually works for you. Angels sing, and a light suddenly fills the room. - "goddamn idiotic truckload of sh*t": when it breaks
  • Obligatory (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @08:59AM (#12301668) Journal
    Now, expect a thundering herd of comments like:
    Great! Now, Linus can be helping to build OSS counterparts to commercial software that can be truly trusted, rather than rely on the whims of a commercial vendor.
    and
    This is just another example of where OSS software is MORE RELIABLE than their commercial counterparts.
    The thing is, they'd be right.

    The only thing is to remember: The terms of Linus' use of BK was noncommercial which is poison to a commercial entity. The combination of closed-source + no charge == noncommercial. If it was OSS, with a GPL-like license, at least the OSS community could give something back to BK that wasn't money, but it wasn't, and BK had no opportunity to profit in ANY WAY from this move.

    I'm not surprised this didn't work out well.
    • Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)

      by wed128 ( 722152 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:07AM (#12301710)
      yea, but the fact that BitKeeper was used was basically free advertising for the target audience of BK. System Designer #1:
      "Well, after looking it over, we've decided to buy a Bitkeeper liscence. it seems more robust than the competition, plus linus uses it!"
    • Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Barsema ( 106323 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:35AM (#12301884) Homepage
      Saying BK did not profit in ANY WAY from providing Linus with Bitkeeper for no charge, is like saying Nike does not profit in ANY WAY from the fact they are giving Tiger Woods golf-gear for no charge.
      In fact I think BK got a bargain and they've gone and thrown it away.
  • git, (Score:3, Funny)

    by jago25_98 ( 566531 ) <<slashdot> <at> <phonic.pw>> on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:00AM (#12301671) Homepage Journal
    Linguistic genius!
  • Tridge Speaks (Score:5, Informative)

    by anandpur ( 303114 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:02AM (#12301677)
    From Groklaw [groklaw.net]

    Groklaw's stevem heard Tridge's speech today at the LCA 2005 conference, Australia's national Linux conference, and he has a report for us:

    This was taken from my memory of Dr. Andrew Tridgell's keynote at this years LCA2005 Conference.
    Essentially Tridge did *NOT* do anything that anyone could ever possibly ever take as breaking a BitKeeper licence, as far as I can see. How was it done? He, like any good sysadmin would, first off telnetted to the BitKeeper port on a BitKeeper server.

    $ telnet thunk.org 5000
    WhooHoo! Connection! So, next obvious step that we *all* do is type in the obvious:

    help
    Back came a list of commands to manipulate the BitKeeper server and ask things of it. Well, according to Tridge, a bit of reading of the LKML (Linux Kernel Email List) shows that the "clone" command is the way to checkout someones source code repository.

    So Tridge's massive "reverse engineering" project came down to a single line of shell script:

    $ echo clone | nc thunk.org 5000 > e2fsprogs.dat
    Hey presto, Tridge has just checked out from a BitKeeper repository into the file e2fsprogs.dat.

    The audience was laughing and cheering Tridge on as he explained just what a Mountain had been made of this Molehill. And I mean made by both sides of the issue -- those who he said he was some Uber Reverse Engineering Wizard and those who claimed that he MUST have used a BK client.

    Funny report, isn't it? Anyway, now you know Tridge's side of the story.
  • by slavemowgli ( 585321 ) * on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:02AM (#12301678) Homepage
    There's two major flaws in the ZDNet article, really - outside of the fact that they unfortunately buy into McVoy's lies and FUD, they get two things outright wrong.

    1) BitKeeper's "free" license does not say that you can't use BK to work on a competing product - it says that you cannot work on a competing product AT ALL, no matter whether you use BK for it or not.

    2) It's not true that Tridge hasn't "kept up their end of the bargain". He never used BK at all, so why would he be bound by BK's license? McVoy may not like what Tridge did, but let's face it, reverse engineering for compatibility is perfectly acceptable - even the much-maligned DMCA explicitely allows it, because lawmakers realized that it's important.

    So, McVoy can rant and rave all he wants - the fact remains that HE is the one who did not keep up his end of the "bargain". The bargain was that kernel developers get to use BK for free, and BitMover gets free advertising - now that the company has established itself, it doesn't need that sort of advertising anymore, so they're just looking for a convenient excuse to pull the plug on the "free" BK.

    The fact that McVoy doesn't admit that is probably to be expected, but still, it doesn't change the fact that he spreads just as much FUD and lies as Darl McBride, Laura DiDio, Maureen O'Gara, Steve Balmer and so on.

    I, for one, sure hope he gets what he deserves.
    • reverse engineering for compatibility is perfectly acceptable

      Absolutely. You know, when Linus came up with Linux instead of extending Minix a lot of people were upset with him for the wasted duplication of effort. When Linus continued working on Linux when the BSD codebase was released and for years was so much more stable and capable than Linux, the same kind of "he's just duplicating something that's great" arguments were heard. Yes, Bitkeeper helped the open source community... but so did Andrew Tannen
    • but . . ., but . . .

      Larry said very clearly that his company is the most open source friendly company in existance. Surely he wouldn't lie about that would he?

      Seriously, I'd have modded you up, but you were already at the max.

  • by xtracto ( 837672 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:04AM (#12301690) Journal
    from one of TFAs:
    But that's not what Tridge did... He didn't create something new and impressive. He just tore down something new (and impressive) because he could, and rather than helping others, he screwed people over. And you expect me to respect that kind of behaviour?" wrote Torvalds

    Come on!, so what if someone makes a program that implements a cool funcionality from another?? I see it in every game that has been developed in the last 20 years!, thats why whe have genres!, also, that would mean that OpenOffice is bad! or what about the same Linux (Unix clone??) or all the BSD's.

    I think Linus went to far with that, so also to do SAMBA was a "non respectable behaviour" to him? wtf without SAMBA I bet they would be a really, REALLY big amount of people (and companies) not using Linux these days.

    If he does not want to use it, then do not do it, but do not flame the author for doing it, and tell that is not a respectable behaviour! it seems that the most notable figure of Open Source has acquired a Not-So-Open State of Mind.

    my 2C
    • Its the attitude towards it. Its a heroic undertaking when OSS does it and its stealing when Microsoft do it.
      • Its a heroic undertaking when OSS does it and its stealing when Microsoft do it.

        I'm sorry, where exactly has Microsoft been accused of stealing when they copied functionality?

        They've been accused of stealing when they've actually used other people's code. They've been accused of embrace-and-extend when they've copied functionality and modified it so the original product they copied no longer interoperates with them. Stealing ideas? Sure, everyone gets accused of that, but nobody in the OSS community with any credibility is going to use that kind of phrase except in jest. And when Microsoft "steals" ideas and they're good ones they often get praised and encouraged for it... all the way back to hierarchical file systems and UNIX style system calls in DOS 2.11...

        So you can keep your "double standard" banner under your hat today, it's not happening.
  • by dfn5 ( 524972 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:05AM (#12301693) Journal
    "Hey BitKeeper, you Git"

  • by MajorDick ( 735308 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:06AM (#12301704)
    If it allowed him to work efficently (and it did) for quite some time

    Very simply that time has passed, and NO-ONE other than Linus himself knows what works best for HIM and his direct team

    The flaming is useless hes "The Man" and what he wants for us in Linux land is pretty much Law, besides, how many of YOU psting all these nasty comments about his original BitKeeper descision actually were granted access to it directly, NONE.

    Linus is a pragmatist not a rabid OS advocate but willing to use closed source tools if its a winning situation for him.
    • Linus is a pragmatist not a rabid OS advocate

      *snort*

      Linux is a great guy, who's got both strong technical and strong "people" skills - a rare combination that's made Linux what it is today. But he does get bent out of shape over operating systems awfully easily.
    • by m50d ( 797211 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:54AM (#12302023) Homepage Journal
      His word is not law, that's the whole point of OSS. We can fork it when he does stupid things. We don't want to waste effort, so we flame him first.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:06AM (#12301706)
    "Jeremy Allison, who wrote Samba with Andrew 'Tridge' Tridgell, is sticking up for his friend in the row over BitKeeper."

    Yeah, well, so is nearly all the world, except for Linus and Larry McVoy. I'm sorry, Linus' actions are just plain hypocritical here. I can understand how he was pissed at losing a useful tool. I can't understand how he can promote McVoy at the expense of our freedoms, especially to reverse Engineer.

    Mod me down, but Linus has too big of a head on his shoulders. He is NOT indespensible, thanks to the GPL. What does go around, comes around. And this action won't be forgotten. With all due respect to him, I think it's one of his biggest blunders in the history of Linux.

    • by slashdot_commentator ( 444053 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @01:23PM (#12303863) Journal
      I'm sorry, Linus' actions are just plain hypocritical here. I can understand how he was pissed at losing a useful tool. I can't understand how he can promote McVoy at the expense of our freedoms, especially to reverse Engineer.

      How is Linus being a hypocrite? He does not introduce himself as an official F/OSS spokesman. He never said proprietary software was intolerable that it never should be used in any circumstance.

      I can't understand how he can promote McVoy at the expense of our freedoms, especially to reverse Engineer.

      Because you're a Stalinist Communist. You are too mentally limited to listen to other points of view. Linus never attacked Tridgell's right to reverse-engineer. Torvalds attacked Tridgell's unilateral decision to scuttle the agreement he had with McVoy. I have the right to own a firearm (in the US). It doesn't mean I would be justified to conduct target practice at a shopping mall or woods near a highway. You are so concerned about your rights, you think nothing of abrogating Torvald's right to choose what software he wishes to use. Much like a Communist would.

      He is NOT indespensible, thanks to the GPL.

      Then fork, you loud-mouthed Communist.

      With all due respect to him, I think it's one of his biggest blunders in the history of Linux.

      Nope, I think his biggest blunder was prematurely releasing 2.4 before he had a stable memory manager. I think it really illustrated the amateur nature or limitations of Linux kernel development philosophy. And I'm not thrilled about many minor decisions he has made. But I equate Torvalds to Democracy. And I'll take him before you anytime, Communista.

  • Eh? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Aldric ( 642394 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:08AM (#12301718)
    Although Torvalds is revered by many within the open source community as the founder of Linux, he also has detractors among the free software movement. There is even a conspiracy theory on news site Slashdot that the anti-Torvalds rhetoric may have the underlying aim of persuading the open source community to switch to Hurd -- an alternative to the Linux kernel that is being developed by the Free Software Foundation.

    Did I miss something? I saw some comments to that effect in the stories, mostly as a joke except for the usual random nutcases that see conspiracies in everything that happens. Terrible journalism from zdnet here.

    The rest of the article wasn't any better, being the most heavily biased piece of crap I've read since the last TCO study by Microsoft. Linus and Tridge both have valid points but the article paints Tridge as a villain breaking BitKeeper copyright (which he didn't) and terms of service (which he didn't agree to).

    • Re:Eh? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Linux_ho ( 205887 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:52AM (#12302010) Homepage
      Yeah, my favorite line in the article:
      There is even a
      conspiracy theory [slashdot.org] on news site Slashdot that the anti-Torvalds rhetoric may have the underlying aim of persuading the open source community to switch to Hurd -- an alternative to the Linux kernel that is being developed by the Free Software Foundation.
      It was a JOKE. Note the (Score:5, Funny) tag. Just an FYI for all you non-geek journalists reading Slashdot: if you're not laughing, you should interpret (Score:5, Funny) as a clue that some piece of geek humor may have just gone way over your head. Do not take comments on Slashdot seriously, especially if you see (Score:5, Funny). This would be a mistake.

      This has been a public service announcement from the Geek Nation Communication Explanation Foundation.
  • And this is his way of saying fork you.
  • Doubled file size!? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:23AM (#12301814)
    From TFA:
    Among the differences: Git can't rename a file; users must instead delete one and recreate it elsewhere with the new name, McVoy said. And it doesn't handle space efficiently;
    a tiny one-character change to a 1MB file in Git will result in a 2MB file, whereas BitKeeper's file will grow only by one byte.
    Does anyone know why diff wasn't used here? 1 byte difference (BitKeeper) is excellent, a 100 bytes (diff) is alright, but doubling the file size (Git) seems really insane to the untrained eye..
  • Up and running! (Score:5, Informative)

    by anpe ( 217106 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:28AM (#12301841)
    Today in the lkml

    Subject:Linux 2.6.12-rc3

    Linus Torvalds
    Wed, 20 Apr 2005 18:00:21 -0700

    Ok,
    you know what the subject line means by now, but this release is a bit
    different from the usual ones, for obvious reasons. It's the first in a
    _long_ time that I've done without using BK, and it's the first one ever
    that has been built up completely with "git".


    Complete message here [mail-archive.com]
  • by mrwiggly ( 34597 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:42AM (#12301928)

    "Torvalds could have done something constructive: he could have written the best damn OS [Operating System] on the planet, and believed that open source generates better things, and competed against AT&T that way," says a Bell Labs Spokespers in the posting.

  • Erm, name change... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Xarius ( 691264 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @10:06AM (#12302114) Homepage
    There is a package manager, make-based one at that, out there called git. Site in german, package in English [home.wtal.de].

    It's a good tool, which basically monitors source-built programs and creates an uninstallation script for them.

    Won't this mean Linus' new tool will have to have a name change?
  • by Newtonian_p ( 412461 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @10:28AM (#12302291) Homepage
    I found this on kernel.org:
    ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/ [kernel.org]

    It's empty at the moment but we'll probably be seeing the source code appearing in it soon.
  • by dmaxwell ( 43234 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @11:00AM (#12302577)
    Nobody except maybe McVoy should have gotten upset over this anyway. It seems to me that at least the free version of Bitkeeper was subject to the CalvinBall License. The problem is that Tridge doesn't seem to play CalvinBall. Something like this happening was inevitable.
  • NAME CLASH !!!!!!! (Score:5, Informative)

    by psergiu ( 67614 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @11:11AM (#12302722)
    A software package named git - also known as the 'Gnu Interactive Tools' - allready exists.

    http://www.gnu.org/software/git/git.html

    Think at it as a combination on Midnight Commander with emacs keybindings & config. Me and a lot of people use this usefull shell.

    So please change the name of this source versioning package.
  • It's a shame... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by [Xorian] ( 112258 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @04:49PM (#12306447)

    ...Linus didn't discover Vesta [vestasys.org] before he started implementing git. The core of the two are very similar.

    • Linus said "git is not an SCM. it's a filesystem designed to host an SCM". The Vesta repository is a filesystem. It has a versioning system (and a builder) built on top of it.
    • git's backing store is indexed by a hash of the file contents, just like Vesta's.
    • git stores complete copies of files, but only one copy of each file, just like Vesta.

    Of course there are some important differences. Like the fact that Vesta's been around for over a decade, and has been in production use for microprocessor design at Compaq and Intel for over 6 years.

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