[Arch-TK]

People wonder why Linus Torvalds dislikes github.

Imagine writing a highly performant and featureful relational database and successfully using it with large projects for a while without the database itself becoming particularly popular and then having a company come along and popilarise your database by telling lots of people about how good it is as a flat key value store.

Then people are really confused and annoyed as to why their key value store has this complicated and confusing relational database attached to it so they write lots of guides skimming over the details to help people get better at using the database to just store keys and values in one table.

If I was Linus I would be pretty pissed too.

[josephg]

That story strikes home for me. I worked at a company years ago where I designed and implemented a custom event queue like architecture using lua scripts in redis. The data would eventually end up in another database, but it would start its journey by being sent to redis. Once it was in redis the application servers considered it to be "committed".

Of course, sometimes bugs showed up in our system. One of the engineering leads would often say "oh lets just clear the redis cache". Every time I told him no, and once again slowly explained how we weren't using redis as a cache, and how deleting everything in redis would delete user data and be a terrible idea. He would have this far away look in his eye while nodding along and pretending he understood. I guess in his mind he was just thinking - why on earth would it be unsafe to clear the "redis cache"?

Months later I went on holidays. They ran into some bug. He reacted by wiping everything in redis. And, predictably, all hell broke loose. User data rollbacks happened, which caused cascading failures in the UI (which assumed that rollbacks would never happen). The team ended up reconstructing some lost data from some JSON which accidentally ended up in web request logs. Users had downtime as the whole app broke. It was a disaster.

When I got back to the office, I was hit with some strange combination of "why weren't you here" and "why didn't you tell us". Ugh. I still think about it sometimes. I have no idea how I could have handled that better. But I can tell you one thing for sure: I lost a lot of respect for that engineer.

[zarzavat]

As far as I understand, Linus doesn’t write code. He reviews code other people have written, and even other deputies review the code before it gets to him.

Additionally, many people are paid to work on his project by other companies. Linus doesn’t pay them, yet he’s their boss.

All of this is to say that Linus is very insulated from externalities. He can insist on his platonic ideal of a commit and SCM, if it makes his life easier. He’s like the editor at a publishing house, rejecting countless manuscripts yet never writing a word himself. And that’s fine.

However, most people do not use an SCM like Linus does. If you’re maintaining an open source project on GitHub you’re probably working for free, as are the people submitting PRs. The more difficult you make their lives, the fewer people will be willing to submit PRs and the more work you’ll have to do eventually.

[Arch-TK]

It's really irrelevant what Linus does now or what your personal opinion of version control is. The point is, git does certain things well, and a large portion of its users don't seem to need or want it. Not it might be because those users don't understand what they're missing out or whatever, but git was written by Linus from endless experience dealing with both contributing and maintaining code. It's simply wrong to suggest that Linux has no idea what he's talking about from a contributor perspective. Moreover, there's still plenty of people, who actually understand git, who are happy with the workflow that it was designed around. Yes it's a complex tool, but it's not as nonsensical or confusing as the people insisting on not using it to its full extent seem to always claim it is.