[luckydude]

Um, this idea was taken from BitKeeper which has had this feature for 10 years.

I know it's not cool to give BK any credit but almost 100% of what is in git, hg, bzr came from BK and you can go dig through the history and prove that for yourself.

[tsally]

And that is why annoying one of the better programmers in the world today by withdrawing his free license is a bad idea. Git only exists because Linus didn't want to migrate to the commercial version of BK.

[luckydude]

Maybe you ought to talk to Linus about that and get the real answer. What you just said is nonsense and Linus, if you can get his attention, will be happy to set you straight.

In case you can't get his attention, the real story is that Linus understood that letting Tridge create a clone of BK was just asking for trouble. Imagine if there was a commercial clone of git, done by people without access to the git source code. And it was used to read and write git repos. Now imagine that the commercial guys didn't really understand git and they made a mistake and that mistake corrupted part of the repo. And imagine that that corruption got picked up and propogated by the real git.

Kind of a mess, right? Especially when you consider that git is a distributed system. Actually happened to the Linux kernel when it was in BK because someone went and editted the metadata directly to "fix" a problem. How do you fix a problem that is in thousands of repos? We fixed it by putting knowledge of the Linux kernel and that problem into BK and doing a new release.

Linus was smart enough to realize that that sort of problem was extremely likely if people started using a Tridge created BK clone. And he realized that there was zero chance that when problems occurred that people would blame them on Tridge, BK would catch all the flack. So he got off BK because he was actually grateful for the help we provided and wasn't interested in causing us harm.

This was after him spending months arguing with Tridge that Tridge was doing the wrong thing.

But don't take my word for it, go ask him.

[tsally]

I appreciate the correction. My statement was based on my memory of the news reports at the time. Clearly my memory failed in this case. :-p

[luckydude]

No problem, the news at the time was pretty slanted and I was too burned out to go correct it. Better late than never I suppose.

Have fun with Git, other than cruddy rename support, it's a nice system. Frigging fast, I gotta hand that one to Linus, it's faster than BK on some stuff.