[gruseom]

Git is one of those cases where something that begins life as an incremental improvement turns out to be such an incremental improvement that a qualitative leap occurs. New things become possible that you just wouldn't have thought of before - there wouldn't have been any point. Applications in completely unrelated areas spring up.

Sometimes I think that Torvalds may end up being remembered more for git than for Linux.

[axod]

"Sometimes I think that Torvalds may end up being remembered more for git than for Linux."

Seriously??? I think even he would think that slightly laughable.

Git seems like an ok-ish version control system - there are a ton of them about now. Linux was a pretty big revolution and is pretty unique.

[blasdel]

Linus has wrought three public miracles:

1) He had the chutzpah to just sit down and write a straightforward kernel for the 386, with no intentions of pedagogy (minix), research (mach), or circlejerkery (hurd).

2) He pioneered the distributed development model in the late 90s that made it possible for Linux to bloom.

3) He sat down and advanced the state of free version control a decade over the course of a weekend.

His initial writing of Linux is the least important of the three, if he hadn't done it someone else would have. The remarkable thing is how he kept it going.

[chollida1]

> 3) He sat down and advanced the state of free version control a decade over the course of a weekend.

I'd say that's a bit of a stretch. Remember DARCS and Mecurial were both out when he wrote git. Though Mercurial wasn't that old:)

Read this: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/version-control/version-con...

Many people prefer Hg over Git, though I prefer Git, and it was written before Git.

I'd agree that Linus helped "advance the state of free version control", but certainly not by a decade when compared to other pre existing free version control systems.

[axod]

Which has the most alternatives/competitors. Git or Linux?

[gruseom]

Seriously???

Well, half-seriously. History makes it very clear that you can't tell in advance what someone will be remembered for... often the thing that everyone thought was the biggest deal is just forgotten. Certainly it doesn't matter what Linus thinks about it.

I'd say git is a lot more than an ok-ish version control system because of two things: its design (hashes and all that) and its efficiency. We were using darcs before, which is fine, but after using them both extensively I can say that they are two systems that aren't in the same league. Even their leagues aren't in the same league. Git is so much more powerful that you begin to have new ideas - that's the point of my original comment.

[eru]

Wasn't this possible with other version systems before?

[ken]

There may be truth to that, but I don't think this is a very good example. Joey Hess has kept his ~ and /etc in CVS (and later, SVN) since 2000 or so. You don't need any particular feature of Git or even a DVCS to keep your system completely versioned.