[nknight]

> To me, git feels like building blocks that you use to create your own versioning system and workflow

That's because it is almost exactly that. It helps to go back and read the earliest discussions of it.

Linus didn't build a version control system. He never really intended to. He built "gitfs" and equivalents of mkfs, fsck, cd, rm, mv, cp, and a thousand other tools for manipulating it.

Unfortunately, they were also built rather specifically to Linus's mental model and the kernel's workflow, so they look pretty funny to everyone else.

It's getting better. The git of 2012 is a lot friendlier than the git of 2005. But the impedance mismatch between what Linus was building and what the rest of the world expects is a long way from being eliminated.