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0 pointsrob742y ago0 comments

Well, the fact that he and the other Linux maintainers had previously used (and were intimately familiar with) BitKeeper, and thus had a good idea of what their new FLOSS DVCS should look like, probably also helped.

Not saying that he copied BitKeeper 1:1, but if you look at BitKeeper usage examples (http://www.bitkeeper.org/), they do look familiar, don't they? BTW, BitKeeper is now open source - and development seems to have largely ceased...

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avg_dev2y ago

Well, this is too is pretty clearly highlighted in the article... I mean it doesn't really matter too much, but

> He aimed to create a tool that was:

> Distributed: [...]

> Compatible: The new tool would incorporate as many features and workflows as BitKeeper.

> Secure: [...]

and there is another quote from Linus Torvalds contained in the article:

> 'Well, it was obviously designed for our workflow, so that is part of it. I’ve already mentioned the whole “distributed” part many times, but it bears repeating. But it was also designed to be efficient enough for a biggish project like Linux, and it was designed to do things that people considered “hard” before git – because those are the things I do every day.'

rlnorthcutt2y ago

Honestly, I think that is the key. He didn't just create Git out of thin air... he spent alot of time thinking about what he wanted and using something that gave him a conceptual foundation.

10 days of writing code is impressive, but there would many,many days of thinking that preceded it.

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