Version Control with Git

Time Line

With the stage set, a bit of external impetus, and a dire VCS crisis imminent, Git sprang to life in April 2005.

Git became self-hosted on April 7 with this commit:

commit e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23ca2e25604af29
Author: Linus Torvalds <[e-mail]>
Date:   Thu Apr 7 15:13:13 2005 -0700

    Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

Shortly thereafter, the first Linux commit was made:

commit 1da177e4c3f41524e886b7f1b8a0c1fc7321cac2
Author: Linus Torvalds <[e-mail]>
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!

That one commit introduced the bulk of the entire Linux Kernel into a Git repository.^[4] It consisted of the following:

17291 files changed, 6718755 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

Yes, that’s an introduction of 6.7 million lines of code!

It was just three minutes later when the first patch using Git was applied to the kernel. Convinced that it was working, Linus announced it on April 20, 2005 to the Linux Kernel Mailing List.

Knowing full well that he wanted to return to the task of developing the kernel, Linus handed the maintenance of the Git source code to Junio Hamano on July 25, 2005, announcing that “Junio was the obvious choice.”

About two months later, version 2.6.12 of the Linux Kernel was released using Git.

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^[4] See http://kerneltrap.org/node/13996 for a starting point on how the old BitKeeper logs were imported into a Git repository for older history (pre-2.5).