Re: Official git repository history?

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Jun 30, 2009, 19:01 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.01.0906301058100.3605@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <h2chap$i27$1@ger.gmane.org>

On Tue, 30 Jun 2009, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> 
> Last night I played further with the first ever commit. I managed to 
> figure out the sequence in which commands had to be run. Kudos to the 
> people that decided the make the commands easier in the later versions. 
> :-)

Well, in all fairness, even _I_ didn't enjoy using it at that stage. It was all very hacky, with the manual "write-tree" + "commit-tree" stuff.

But it's interesting to look at the timing:

 - Start early April

 - First git commit April 7

 - first kernel commit April 16

 - first merge: April 17 (14:47)

The time of that first merge is interesting, because it's worth correlating the git tree with the early kernel tree there. What preceded that first merge? Yup: the git 'merge-base' program was written a couple of hours before.

But the really interesting thing (to me) is that while I had tools/scripts to apply patches and to do relatively fancy tthings like merges etc basically just a couple of weeks after starting, it's telling just how long it took for something as simple as "git commit" to happen: May 30.

Never mind that it was actually just a totally trivial shell script, literally just a few lines. So it wasn't about the technology, it's very much a sign of what mattered to me.

I mean, I had a tool to create merges with conflicts back in mid-april! But something as simple as just committing the existing tree? No tools, you had to do that whole

	git-update-index ..
	commit=$(git-commit-tree $(git-write-tree) -p HEAD)
	.. type in message ..
	echo $commit > .git/HEAD

song-and-dance by hand.

Or use cogito, which explains the success of early wrappers - other people had rather different priorities than I did.

			Linus