Linus Torvalds wrote:

On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Bram Cohen wrote:

quoted

Now that you're done being dismissive, could you either (a) rebut my quite
detailed explanation of exactly why that functionality is both a dubious
idea and difficult to implement, or (b) admit that you have no plans
whatsoever for supporting any of this stuff? You can't have it both ways.

I'm absolutely not going to do it myself, you're right about that.

Now you're just being an ass. I stated, flatly, that what you're proposing
to have done (by you or whoever, for feasibility it doesn't matter which)
is not going to happen due to just plain difficulty. You obviously
disagree with me, but rather than coming out and saying so you're
pretending I didn't make that statement.

quoted

What I'd really like to hear is some explanation of why git is
reimplementing all of this stuff from scratch.

Git does in ~5000 lines and two weeks of work what _I_ think is the right
thing to do.

So you think that a system which supports snapshots and history but has no
merging functionality whatsoever is the right thing? I'm asking this
seriously. You have a magic --make-somebody-else-do-merge command, but for
everybody else the current state of things is workable as a stopgap
measure (the original plan) but very painful for anything more.

Codeville is comparable in terms of number of lines of code to Git, by the
way.

You're welcome to disagree, but the fact is, people have whined and
moaned about my use of BK FOR THREE YEARS without showing me any better
alternatives.

You were happy with BitKeeper, so why should we? Monotone and Codeville
are only just about now really mature, and you aren't exactly known as a
model customer.

So why are you complaining now, when I implement my own version in two
weeks?

I'm trying to tell you that the amount of time between now and when a
system as nice as BitKeeper is in use by the kernel can be dramatically
reduced by either using an existing system verbatim or basing new efforts
on one.

If you think that git as it exists right now is at all comparable to
Monotone or Codeville you're completely delusional.

quoted

In case these concepts got conflated, I'd like to point out that Codeville
merge both supports renames *and* does better than three-way merge can do
at merging a single, non-renamed file.

And I'd like to point out (again) that git doesn't actually care what
merge strategy the user uses.

Me _personally_, I want to have something that is very repeatable and
non-clever. Something I understand _or_ tells me that it can't do it. And
quite frankly, merging single-file history _without_ taking all the other
files' history into account makes me go "ugh".

Now you've just gone off the deep end. This is an apples-to-apples
comparison. Please accept one of thee following two statements:

(a) Git doesn't do merging, and none of the related new tools around it do
merging.

(b) Codeville merge (sans rename functionality) would be superior for the
merging which will be done.

-Bram