Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git

[Mark0]

If you never heard Linus "live", this is a great speak IMHO to get a some bit of Linus's way of doing things:

YouTube - Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git

It's also a lot of (geek) fun! 

[ewemoa]

Prompted by tinjaw's recent post, I've started watching this talk again.  I'm taking notes this time and found the following transcript to be helpful:

http://git.wiki.kern...Talk200705Transcript

(Not surprisingly, I'm finding that listening / watching to the talk is more entertaining, but interfacing with the transcript takes much less time.)

[zridling]

Thanks for the transcript, ewemoa. I remember watching this a couple of years ago. Above my head because I've never seen git in action.

[parkint]

... I've never seen git in action.

-zridling (January 28, 2010, 06:42 AM)

Let me encourage all who read this to give it a try.  Coming from the same world as many of you (Subversion, etc) I feel like I have wasted a lot of time and effort clinging to what was 'comfortable' and 'familiar'.
Now I am a big zealot for git and use it in many different ways.

</soapbox>

[mouser]

There's a nice rant against Git (and for Mercurial) on this thread:
https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=21512.0

[tinjaw]

There's a nice rant against Git (and for Mercurial) on this thread:
https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=21512.0

-mouser (January 28, 2010, 11:58 AM)

Thank you for pointing this out.

[f0dder]

I've been playing with GIT the last couple of days, and well... I can see there's an immense amount of power in it - it's great having pretty much instantaneous local commits, where you can commit code that might not even compile, just for the sake of being able to revert - and then when stuff works, you can push to your repository.

There's also some really nice properties of it being distributed - you can choose to work in a traditional way where everybody pushes/pulls from one central repository, or you can use the more distributed method where interested people pull from you... and you can mix and match. Interesting, and useful, when collaborating with several people and working on experimental feature branches.

Unfortunately, git has a pretty high complexity level, and it's pretty easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Some of the commands used in everyday management seem a bit odd, and the ability to do "revisionistic history" is scary (there's been times when I wanted that in subversion, but in git it seems pretty common to edit/delete history :-O)

And the tools... ugh. msysgit is one big crapball. libexec/git-core has 110 git-*.exe of around 964KB each. Haven't the developers heard of static dynamic linking? Or NTFS hardlinks? (just about all of the files are identical, and those that aren't probably should have been) - at the very least, they could've made a 4kb-or-less executable that simply launch git.exe with argv[0] replaced... it also seems superfluous that it always installs perl5, tcl, vim et cetera instead of being able to use already installed locations, if present. Even after hardlinking the identical files (which saved me ~90MB iirc), my git install folder is ~120MB on disk. Contrast that with 7.5MB for subversion.

Then there's TortoiseGit... which does seem to work OK, but it requires the use of msysgit - and it does show that it depends on commandline tools and stdout piping, rather than a proper "libgit". Status progress isn't updated smoothly, and things seem a bit flaky here and there.

IMHO it's pretty darn arrogant of Linus (and whoever maintain git now) to not really consider Windows at all, but requiring posix emulation crapola. Since the git cmdline tools don't deal with GUI and probably don't require advanced OS features, how hard would it be to encapsulate os-specific details? Pretty typical, anyway... "portable" usually means "to posix systems" only - and often you're lucky if portable doesn't just mean "to (most) linux distributions".

[ewemoa]

Unfortunately, git has a pretty high complexity level, and it's pretty easy to shoot yourself in the foot.

-f0dder (February 03, 2010, 06:01 AM)

This is one of the reasons I'm looking at Mercurial   From what I read though, git seems to be much less complex now than it was originally (though that may still be too much).

I haven't started looking at Bazaar yet, but their Bazaar Explorer looks enticing for trying to learn their system.

[phitsc]

Probably not the most objective reason: but I think I'll consider looking at Bazaar or Mercurial instead of git because (judging from the transcript) I just don't like Linus' arrogant and unfriendly attitude.

Not doubting that Linus is an intelligent guy, I'm asking myself if it is also because of this attitude that he became so successful, or if instead he developed this attitude because of his immense success.

[steeladept]

Not doubting that Linus is an intelligent guy, I'm asking myself if it is also because of this attitude that he became so successful, or if instead he developed this attitude because of his immense success.

-phitsc (July 20, 2010, 06:44 AM)

Interesting question and one that could just as easily be posed for Steve Jobs.  Is there a link?  Inquiring minds want to know.   

[steeladept]

And the tools... ugh. msysgit is one big crapball. libexec/git-core has 110 git-*.exe of around 964KB each. Haven't the developers heard of static linking? Or NTFS hardlinks? (just about all of the files are identical, and those that aren't probably should have been) - at the very least, they could've made a 4kb-or-less executable that simply launch git.exe with argv[0] replaced... it also seems superfluous that it always installs perl5, tcl, vim et cetera instead of being able to use already installed locations, if present. Even after hardlinking the identical files (which saved me ~90MB iirc), my git install folder is ~120MB on disk. Contrast that with 7.5MB for subversion.

Then there's TortoiseGit... which does seem to work OK, but it requires the use of msysgit - and it does show that it depends on commandline tools and stdout piping, rather than a proper "libgit". Status progress isn't updated smoothly, and things seem a bit flaky here and there.

IMHO it's pretty darn arrogant of Linus (and whoever maintain git now) to not really consider Windows at all, but requiring posix emulation crapola. Since the git cmdline tools don't deal with GUI and probably don't require advanced OS features, how hard would it be to encapsulate os-specific details? Pretty typical, anyway... "portable" usually means "to posix systems" only - and often you're lucky if portable doesn't just mean "to (most) linux distributions".

-f0dder (February 03, 2010, 06:01 AM)

You imply that these are not particularly difficult issues to work around as long as you know what you are doing.  Is this something you could fairly easily repackage into a "WinGit" package that would make it more friendly?  Just asking, because it sounds like something that would be well received and a fairly simple branch off the main project (if someone were willing).

[f0dder]

You imply that these are not particularly difficult issues to work around as long as you know what you are doing.  Is this something you could fairly easily repackage into a "WinGit" package that would make it more friendly?  Just asking, because it sounds like something that would be well received and a fairly simple branch off the main project (if someone were willing).

-steeladept (July 20, 2010, 09:04 AM)

It should be fairly simple - I dunno which installer they use, but even if it's fairly limited one could do an install step that runs a tool which either creates NTFS hardlinks, or or populates the git-blah[/b].exe with argv[0]-replacing-dummy-thing mentioned above

Probably not the most objective reason: but I think I'll consider looking at Bazaar or Mercurial instead of git because (judging from the transcript) I just don't like Linus' arrogant and unfriendly attitude.

-phitsc (July 20, 2010, 06:44 AM)

+1 for that. It's sorta funny, but mostly just... sad. Yes, other projects might have made (very) poor choices, and git might very well be superior; but Linus' level of rudeness really puts me off. One thing is Joe Random ranting on a blog, but somebody in Linus' position? Ugh.

[tinjaw]

Off Topic or On Tangent. Not sure which this is, but...

RE: Linus' attitude. At the risk of pissing you off, let me say that I believe it's a matter of perspective and that, in my case, the attitude is a plus for git. First of all, remember the venue: Very smart people with opinions and focused domain knowledge at Google invite other very smart people with opinions and focused domain knowledge to enlighten them quickly. Every one at Google can read "unbiased" reviews like everyone else, but they have the *privilege* of being able to have the combination pep-rally and firehose-fed education session quickly and unburdened with "social graces" and "distorted marketing fluff". Taken as the example, a bunch of very smart people at Google use Perforce and probably know it very well - to the point that they know its limitations. If they have work to get done they go straight to the source (pun intended) and get somebody like Linus to explain why they should switch now, quickly, and without looking back. Kind of.

And here is the part that will piss some of you off (based on your comments about Linus' presentation)...

I'm intelligent, more so than your average person. (Why should I deny it or hide it?) And I have been doing what I do for a living for many years. And I do it well. And I am very busy. If you want me to present on a topic I know, I will expect you to know the basics and some of the intermediate topics as a minimum. I will expect you to have focused experience in a related topic. I expect you to have opinions on that related topic and using it to infer things about the topic I am presenting on. I also assume, since I am busy, and you have convinced me to present, that you want an "intense" session because you will do your homework first. You are not there to be complimented, but to be educated. And if I know you have a preference/tendency/opinion in direct or partial conflict with mine, you have asked me to present because you want me to give it my best shot at convincing you are wrong, and stop you from wasting your time on your current path, or further convincing you that you are correct and save you from taking the time to explore my position/path/etc.

Unless, of course, you are British. Then I expect you to be civil and courteous even as you are scolding me and calling me an idiot.

So, in short, when you get intelligent people together that share a common domain, the best conversations/lectures/presentations are controversial and opinionated.

[rgdot]

<offtopic or something> Just do like I do, For every 'commit' use power pro *keys to open the save dialog box and then insert file name with a time stamp...my very own version control   

[Deozaan]

For what it's worth, this tech talk convinced me to get Mercurial, simply because it's so similar to git  but it works with Windows without any hassle.

In other words, I think Linus was spot on and he did a good job convincing me that a distributed source control system is the better system. But my needs require ease of use and Windows.

[phitsc]

Unless, of course, you are British. Then I expect you to be civil and courteous even as you are scolding me and calling me an idiot.

-tinjaw (August 03, 2010, 02:13 PM)

Linus Torvalds is Finnish. I don't think that explains his attitude though . So far, the Finnish people I have met were all very friendly .

I agree with you that the context should certainly not be neglected. Nevertheless, c'est le ton qui fait la musique.