Git is the next Unix

This is the original entry:<p><a href="http://alumnit.ca/~apenwarr/log/?m=200801#31" rel="nofollow">http://alumnit.ca/~apenwarr/log/?m=200801#31</a><p>Same person who brought us "Tracking an entire Windows sytem inside Git" last month:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=455320" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=455320</a><p>Note the title could be construed the wrong way, the author means it is the next unix only as an analogy: it's a new, underlying platform where atomic building blocks can be combined and hooked up by higher level programs to do a lot of great things.

Git is great and it blew and expanded my mind.<p>But I have some questions for the the experts. Is git really a fantastic achievement, or is the praise for git coming from people who are not experts in source control (+)?<p>Based on my cursory readings, it appears that the concepts Git uses (dag, everything is a node, tree snapshotting etc) existed in Bitkeeper.<p>(+): I ask this because I've repeatedly found that what looks like a big conceptual leap to outsiders is actually a gradual evolution. Examples: I first thought RISC was a big leap, but on reading up the technical papers later, I realized that it was made of lots of innovations by lots of people.

GIT is built to manage a large collection of small files. e.g. the linux kernel repos, files that are a only a few KB on average. It is optimized to operate fast on such a cluster of small blobs, but as soon as it processes bigger files (MB,GB) its performance and advantages degrade a lot. Also, the lack of partial checkout makes it painful to get only a subset of the large files that you are storing. Probably because you wouldn't want to checkout only part of the linux kernel.<p>But those limitations may only be in the Git porcelain, all the plumbing underneath might be a great base for the concept of a distributed file system. GIT is the first step in the right direction, or even could be the platform to support it. <a href="http://www.wizbit.org/drupal/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wizbit.org/drupal/</a> is a company that tries to achieve something like that.

So Git is something that should be built into your OS? Yeah, no shit, that's why Squeak has fine-grained version control built-in, and weren't there operating systems that had version-controlled file-systems?

I am wondering can't we use git as database?

Git is an OS now? Let's make a GIT native FS first, or distributed information over 'the cloud'

i'm not sure how any of that makes it the "next unix". a good filesystem replacement/companion maybe, but hardly an operating system.