Git and the Anatomy of the Git Repository

Introduction

Git is an excellent example of the aphorism, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Git was born of necessity by none other than the inventor of Linux, Linus Torvalds. It was developed to replace BitKeeper, the source control system used by Linus and his fellow hobbyists and researchers, to develop the Linux kernel. According to Linus, BitKeeper wasn’t perfect, but it was one of very few distributed SCM systems at the time. It also had one other attractive attribute: it was free. That changed in 2005 when the copyright ...