In this blog post, we’re going to take a look at five commits that made git what it is today. First, some background…
To really understand these commits, you need to go way back to the start of git in 2005. You can read more about the story of git’s creation here and here.
At first, git was simply a better version control tool than anything else out there. But then Linus Torvalds did something amazing; he shared his source code publicly so that others could hack on it. The Linux kernel has always been developed in the open and fortunately for us, git followed this model.
As a result of being developed in the open, people started to contribute features they needed and bug fixes they discovered. These contributions took git from being a better version control tool to being the best version control tool.
Today, I want to tell you a story. A story about five great commits that made git what it is today. These commits are just one tiny part of the history of git, but they tell a story that many people don’t know yet. So let’s get started:
The first commit
On April 7th 2005, Linus Torvalds pushed the first commit of git to the kernel.org servers. The commit didn’t contain much more than a README and a Makefile for building git for the first time.
The second commit
Only six days later, on April 13th 2005, Linus pushed the second commit of git. This time he included some actual code in it (which was written by himself). It was still very early days for git and there were many parts missing, but it already contained some central parts like
The author talks about the history of git and how it has evolved into what it is today. It describes 5 major commits to the code base that were particularly important.
In August 2005, the Linux kernel community had a huge problem. They were growing fast, and their current source control system was struggling to keep up. They needed a new one.
Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, decided to build a new system from scratch called git. This was an ambitious and risky move: many people thought using an existing system like BitKeeper would be easier.
But it worked out. Git became hugely successful outside the kernel community, and today is by far the most widely used source control software in the world.
What was it about git that made it so great? This post will try to answer that question, using five key commits as case studies.
git was originally written by the author of the linux kernel to help Linus manage changes to the code. Since then it has grown into a popular tool for software developers.
What makes git so powerful? What are its most important innovations? What are some of the most important commits over its history? This blog post will answer those questions.
**Commit:** 9c2b957
First, Linus Torvalds invented git.
Then, he and Junio Hamano worked together to make it fast.
After that, they made it easy to use by writing the git book.
Fourth, they added a GUI tool, gitk.
Finally, they worked with GitHub to make it popular with programmers.
Even once Linus Torvalds had settled on the idea of using a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to manage data, he still needed a way to efficiently store that information in a way that would scale. The first version of git used a simple data structure called an object pool. This system worked fine for small projects, but as Linux grew in size, it became apparent that there was much more work to be done.
The solution came in the form of two commits, one by Torvalds and another by Junio Hamano. These two commits replaced the object pool with hard links and gave git the ability to compress objects with zlib. This completely changed the game when it came to handling large projects.
The Linux kernel has grown to over 15 million lines of code since the initial release of git, and the repository grows by thousands of lines every day. Without these two commits, git would never have been able to handle such a project as Linux.