There’s something that bothers me about these sorts of recollections that make git seem… inevitable.

There’s this whole creation myth of how Git came to be that kind of paints Linus as some prophet reading from golden tablets written by the CS gods themselves.

Granted, this particular narrative in the blog post does humanise a bit more, remembering the stumbling steps, how Linus never intended for git itself to be the UI, how there wasn’t even a git commit command in the beginning, but it still paints the whole thing in somewhat romantic tones, as if the blob-tree-commit-ref data structure were the perfect representation of data.

One particular aspect that often gets left out of this creation myth, especially by the author of Github is that Mercurial had a prominent role. It was created by Olivia Mackall, another kernel hacker, at the same time as git, for the same purpose as git. Olivia offered Mercurial to Linus, but Linus didn’t look upon favour with it, and stuck to his guns. Unlike git, Mercurial had a UI at the very start. Its UI was very similar to Subversion, which at the time was the dominant VCS, so Mercurial always aimed for familiarity without sacrificing user flexibility. In the beginning, both VCSes had mind share, and even today, the mindshare of Mercurial lives on in hg itself as well as in worthy git successors such as jujutsu.

And the git data structure isn’t the only thing that could have ever possibly worked. It falls apart for large files. There are workaround and things you can patch on top, but there are also completely different data structures that would be appropriate for larger bits of data.

Git isn’t just plain wonderful, and in my view, it’s not inevitable either. I still look forward to a world beyond git, whether jujutsu or whatever else may come.

Around 2002 or so, I had an idea to tag every part of a project with a unique hash code. With a hash code, one could download the corresponding file. A hash code for the whole project would be a file containing a list of hash codes for the files that make up the project. Hash codes could represent the compiler that builds it, along with the library(s) it links with.

I showed it to a couple software entrepreneuers (Wild Tangent and Chromium), but they had no interest in it.

I never did anything else with it, and so it goes.

> I started using Git for something you might not imagine it was intended for, only a few months after it’s first commit

I started using git around 2007 or so because that company I worked for at the time used ClearCase, without a doubt the most painful version manager I have ever used (especially running it from a Linux workstation). So I wrote a few scripts that would let me mirror a directory into a git repo, do all my committing in git, then replay those commits back to ClearCase.

I can't recall how Git came to me attention in the first place, but by late 2008 I was contributing patches to Git itself. Junio was a kind but exacting maintainer, and I learned a lot about contributing to open source from his stewardship. I even attended one of the early GitTogethers.

As far as I can recall, I've never really struggled with git. I think that's because I like to dissect how things work, and under the covers git is quite simple. So I never had too much trouble with its terribly baroque CLI.

At my next job, I was at a startup that was building upon a fork of Chromium. At the time, Chromium was using subversion. But at this startup, we were using git, and I was responsible for keeping our git mirror up-to-date. I also had the terrible tedious job of rebasing our fork with Chromium's upstream changes. But boy did I get good at resolving merge conflicts.

Git may be the CLI I've used most consistently for nearly two decades. I'm disappointed that GitHub became the main code-review tool for Git, but I'll never be disappointed that Git beat out Mercurial, which I always found overly ridged and was never able to adapt it to my workflow.

As someone who wrote my first line of code in approx 2010 and used git & GH for the first time in… 2013? it kind of amazes me to remember that Git is only 20 years old. GitHub for instance doesn’t seem surprising to me that is <20 years old, but `git` not existing before 2005 somehow always feels shocking to me. Obviously there were other alternatives (to some extent) for version control, but git just has the feeling of a tool that is timeless and so ingrained in the culture that it is hard to imagine (for me) the idea of people being software developers in the post-mainframe age without it. It feels like something that would have been born in the same era as Vim, SSH, etc (ie early 90s). This is obviously just because from the perspective of my programming consciousness beginning, it was so mature and entrenched already, but still.

I’ve never used other source control options besides git, and I sometimes wonder if I ever will!

Very interesting to get some historical context! Thanks for sharing Scott.

Small remark:

> As far as I can tell, this is the first time the phrase “rebase” was used in version control

ClearCase (which I had a displeasure to use) has been using the term "rebase" as well. Googling "clearcase rebase before:2005" finds [0] from 1999.

(by the way, a ClearCase rebase was literally taking up to half an hour on the codebase I was working on - in 2012; instant git rebases blew my mind).

[0] https://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/rational/docs/documentat...