A colleague pointed out this article, reporting on Linus Torvalds giving a talk at some search engine shop about Git, “his” source code management system.

Always interested in something better than CVS/SVN, and a spoiled brat with the various distributed systems available under Smalltalk (like Monticello), I looked at Git back when the kernel folk moved away from Bitkeeper and Linus started on Git. However, Git had a learning curve back then only surmountable with alpine climbing gear, so I dropped it especially because I was a happy Smalltalk camper and my code was fine in either Monticello or Cincom’s StORE.

I totally and completely agree with a) his assessment about CVS and SVN (they suck and they concentrate on solving the wrong problems - and SVN adds insult to injury by not even fixing CVS’ most obvious shortcomings; at least the CVS people can defend themselves by saying that the project is based on a hack around RCS almost 20 years ago) and b) that you really, really, really want distributed repositories. So, I found his presentation highly entertaining, his tongue-in-cheek arrogance very funny, and I would recommend viewing his presentation as long as you are able to take neither CVS/SVN nor his manner of speaking seriously

In the meantime, I played with Git because one of the points Linus makes is that Git is now actually reasonably user-friendly, and it is. It works, it is simple, it has bridges to all the other repository systems, and its design, especially the whole aspect of a single SHA-1 hash securely identifying a full version, is sleek. So I’ll be experimenting with it on my development laptop a bit, starting by pulling our SVN repo into Git for local hacking. Keep an eye on this place for updates.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 at 10:16 pm and is filed under Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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