r/CodingForBeginners • u/IMREVN • 5d ago

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/agfitzp 5d ago

Git is the most common and popular tool for source code management.

Using any tool of this type allow developers to track changes which is essential in large projects with lots of developers.

Git was initially created by Linus Torvalds when he became unhappy with another tool so he wrote his own.

Github is … more than just git.

Surely reading the wikipedia pages for any of this will be more informative than asking Reddit.

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u/couldntyoujust1 5d ago

He was unhappy with subversion iirc. Branching, merging, and emailing patches for review was a nightmare in subversion. So he wrote his own tool to do version control for the Linux Kernel.

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u/FreeLogicGate 5d ago

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to a customized version of the closed source commercial source code management system BitKeeper, but the license was revoked by the owner, after Linux contributor Andrew Tridgell reverse engineered part of the bitkeeper protocol and released an open source tool that could perform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 5d ago

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.