On 13 May 2013 10:51, Kevin Wilson [off-list ref] wrote:

Hello,
I have a question about git patches.
When I run
git log include/linux/skbuff.h
and page down till the end, I reach
1da177e Linux-2.6.12-rc2

(I do it on the net-next tree.)

git show 1da177e gives:
Author: Linus Torvalds [off-list ref]
Date:   Sat Apr 16 15:20:36 2005 -0700

    Linux-2.6.12-rc2

    Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
    even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
    archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
    3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
    git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
    infrastructure for it.

    Let it rip!

So this is the initial patch from 2005.

Now, does it mean that prior to this patch all patches
were not handled by git ? or was there some merging
from an old tree to a new tree where history of git
patches was removed in the new tree ?

The Linux project used to store its code in BitKeeper [1]. But then
Linus wrote Git and Git replaced BitKeeper somewhere in 2005.


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper