linus

Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond are truly the founding fathers and patriarchs of the Free/Open Source movement. The fruits of this movement are well-known even for the non-geek audience. They include the Linux operating system, Firefox browser, OpenOffice suite, MySQL database, plus a plethora of PHP-based content-management systems like WordPress and Drupal which are the driving engines behind the blogosphere... and the list goes on and on.

Despite the fact that the three patriarchs often disagree with each other, their authority is overwhelming enough that when any of them states an opinion, it would be unimaginable for mere mortals like us to disagree with or, God forbid, criticize their ideas. Nevertheless, the "free" in "free software" stands for "liberty", the word that precisely characterizes the Free Software community, a community where any opinion has the right for existance and search for ultimate truth is the path of continued "disrespect" towards authoritative opinions. Besides, we the bloggers are well-known for our arrogance so, the heck with it! We are going to disagree with Linus Torvalds in this posting.

Linus Torvalds recently gave a presentation at Google about a new source-control management (SCM) system he has authored and that is being actively maintained by an open-source community - Git.

If you are a happy user of Subversion, you should take a break right now and watch the video (if you are a "happy" user of CVS, you are hopeless), because it will change and broaden your thinking. Git is not just another version control, it is fundamentally different the way it works.

And it is better! But, how? Ask yourself some questions about your current SCM:

• Do you commit every day? Should you?
• Can you commit if you are offline?
• Do you use branches?
• Do you look forward to merging branches?
• Do you need to have guidelines about naming branches/tags?
• What if your SCM server's disk died?

Now imagine that you have a system where none of these questions give you a shiver. That would be Git.