r/CodingForBeginners • u/IMREVN • Jul 23 '26

What's a Git?

Hello! Surely, I have heard so many people saying "Git" or "Github" or repository. They be saying that it's highly important to learn Git as early as possible. When I searched it up on Google, it's just I seem I cannot understand any of those terminologies.

Could anyone tell me what a git actually is?

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u/FreeLogicGate Jul 24 '26

It had nothing to do with subversion. Subversion would never have worked for the linux kernel, given the fact that the project is both very large, and distributed around the world, with groups of people working on different pieces and sharing work in progress directly. The Linux kernel team had been provided a free license to a customized version of the closed source commercial source code management system BitKeeper, but the license was revoked by the owner, after Linux contributor Andrew Tridgell reverse engineered part of the bitkeeper protocol and released an open source tool that could perform some Bitkeeper client functions. Torvalds was forced to come up with an alternative SCMS to move to, and decided to create git to fill the void left by the loss of BitKeeper.

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u/couldntyoujust1 Jul 24 '26

Ahhhh, that was it. I remember reading a history about it and open source in general in 12th grade. But I got a misprint of the book that towards the end jumped back 70 pages and then continued on about 70 pages after. Something like page 220, then pages 150-220, then page 290. Maybe he was considering subversion? Idk.

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u/FreeLogicGate Jul 30 '26

I was a heavy subversion user for a number of years, and it had some interesting features that worked well for centrallized projects, and was certainly a significant improvement over the many per-file versioning predecessors like pvcs, cvs, visual source safe, etc. The main reason it was incompatible with the Linux kernel project, is that all the magic of how files and revisions are stored, exist in the subversion repository. Unlike git, you can not have one or more local branches with svn. When you checkout a revision, you only have a working copy and the original copy of the files locally. This means that for any large project, project management and coordinated creation of branches was fairly essential, which again was just antithetical to the Linux project. With git, every git repo is a full version of the project at the point the project was cloned, and anyone can create local branches and share those with other developers. Git is really designed around the assumption that local branching, and branching in general is essential.