New Day For Data?
thane February 2nd, 2008
Much like apenwarr, I had heard about git and effectively ignored it. As he, I watched Linus’ video and was skeptical. He, however, took the time to analyze it and came to an interesting conclusion.
Git was originally not a version control system; it was designed to be the infrastructure so that someone else could build one on top. And they did; nowadays there are more than 100 git-* commands installed along with git. It’s scary and confusing and weird, but what that means is git is a platform. It’s a new set of nouns and verbs that we never had before. Having new nouns and verbs means we can invent entirely new things that we previously couldn’t do.
He then produces a litany of difficult projects that he has worked on which git makes trivial. He points out that git moves files faster than cp, and does it checksummed. That git can be used for backups, or for a distributed file system, or for package distribution, or installers, or or or. If it had been written by anyone but Linus Torvald, I would continue to be skeptical. However, he has a track record of writing quickly things that change the face of software. I am going to have to take a closer look at git.
