Ten-year timeline part 6: almost to the present

Oh by, Graydon Hoare -- author of monotone -- posted, at the time, his summary of his
discussion with Linus and reasons why he thinks Linus rejected monotone:

http://www.mail-archive.com/monotone-devel@nongnu.org/msg...

I greatly appreciate the way Graydon is precise and to the point while also being soft-spoken
and charitable towards others.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but I find myself
noticeably happier at the prospect of reading something Graydon has written than something
Linus has written.

A related story to "Linus rejects monotone" is "Linus rejects Mercurial".  There is an
interesting thread on lkml about that.  Here is a climactic point where Linus seems to be
wavering about adopting Mercurial instead of git:

http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/5/3/2

I couldn't find the next inflection point -- where Linus decided to keep git.

I think maybe the last word on the subject belongs to the long-lost ntk.net:

http://www.ntk.net/2005/04/29/

"Given the surfeit of next generation systems - including darcs, codeville, arch, monotone,
bazaar, bazaar-ng, vesta, svk, ArX, aegis, we suspect that the winner will be git, just out of
the Mighty Power Of Fanboyism."

:-)

I was referring to 

  http://lwn.net/Articles/249457/

Sorry -- I didn't really mean *you*.  Your point about releasing a version control system was
an interesting and valid point, I thought.  I didn't really mean any specific person on this
thread -- more the general folklore that I imagine exists in which people think that Linus
took a break from his kernel hacking in order to singlehandedly move forward the state of the
art of revision control.

>I didn't say `Linus invented all this stuff'. I said that he got the representation right,
not that nobody else had ever done the same. I'm not such a fool as to imagine that nobody
else ever tried content-addressable storage in version control systems before. (However, I'm
fairly sure nobody ever released a VCS in such an embryonic state before: generally release
schedules for VCSes are quite conservative because people hate losing their work. It's
impressive that git has managed to go so long with an aggressive release policy with so few
incidents of significant data loss.)

Point of history: Git got the representation (by which I'm assuming you mean the core
file/tree/commit blob design) right because it copied the hard parts from Monotone.  Monotone
got the representation right because it started with a good idea (i.e., "hey, let's use
content-addressing to decouple storage and history representations"), and then evolved it over
several years (including two major representation rewrites, one of which added the crucial
"commit" object), using monthly time-based releases (i.e., "oops, it's Monday, time to ship
whatever's in trunk"), and was self-hosting from ~the very beginning -- I think before Graydon
had even received a single outside patch.  It did all this with continuous field upgrades for
all storage/representation changes, minimal segfault bugs -- I'm remembering ~2-4? (mtn is
written in C++) -- and no reported data loss by any users.

None of which is to say that git is unimpressive -- I don't subscribe to the peculiar notion
whereby any achievement seen once becomes unimpressive forever after -- and git is a
well-done, well-maintained project containing other innovations and that is making a lot of
users happy.  That's always impressive :-).  ATM, in fact, it's doing a better job of it than
monotone is -- probably as a result of Linus's emphasis on building a tool that would be
immediately useful under extreme conditions, while monotone was noodling around trying to
invent about three different novel technologies.  Turns out that one suffices.  Oops.  OTOH,
it's not like this is the first time an idea had to jump projects to move from research to
mainstream; they reward different approaches.  It's entirely possible that if monotone had
started out with the attitude that made git so successful, neither would exist at this point.
So... *shrug*.

(You just *wait* 'til we get those other two nailed down, though!  Muahaha!)