Git is the next Unix?

Is Git the next Unix?

Short answer - no.

Long answer - no, but (a) Git is a powerful distributed source control system for developers and (b) Git's underlying object database is a powerful, fast database (faster than "cp-a" by some accounts). (It might be your next filesystem, though -- read the linked article.)

Git's object database sacrifices some space for ease of manipulation, as each object is a file referred to by its SHA-1 hash. These objects are in a 2-level store, so an object A4F272058... will always be found at A4/272058... This is both fast (as mentioned before) and easy to debug and manipulate. And it is fast (worth mentioning twice), to the point that "git checkout" can be faster than "cp -a" in at least some circumstances.

Take a look at Git Interfaces, frontends, and tools for some of the many tools built on top of or with Git.

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About Mark Leighton Fisher

user-pic Perl/CPAN user since 1992.