Torvalds Gives Inside Skinny on Git

That may not be for everyone.

"Now, that model is very appropriate for me, and I much prefer the Git model over traditional SCMs. But others will quite possibly hate it with a passion. Different often means rough to people," admitted Torvalds.

Torvalds also isnt sure that Git will move far beyond its use with Linux.

"The most superficial roughness will have been fixed in a month or two. … You certainly could use it for other projects. I bet kernel people will, just because they get used to working with Git," he said.

Still, "its a different mentality, and a lot of the things that it does well are probably not horribly relevant to many other projects."

Theres a good reason for this, he said. "Most other projects just dont have tens of thousands of files and hundreds of patches a day, so they dont have the kind of performance requirements that the kernel has.

"Also, most other projects simply dont use the same distributed development that the kernel uses. They have a single central repository, and people work with that, and while you can certainly use Git that way too, you just wont see a lot of advantages to Git if you use it in a centralized manner," Torvalds said.

"So well see," said Torvalds pragmatically.

"Its entirely possible that people will start using Git more widely, but its absolutely not a done deal. Lets face it, most new projects end up being failures, and I wont be terribly upset if Git just ends up being the thing that gets us kernel developers working well until the point where some other SCM ends up being good enough."

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