"What makes version control systems (VCS) so great is this: lots of people can take your code, make little branches, and fiddle around with it in a distributed fashion. Then at some point, you get to merge it all back together in such a way that the VCS will seamlessly delete all the wrong bits, and leave you with a pile of conflicts that takes weeks to manually pick through.
"By a stunning coincidence, that's what VCS do to people, too. And so it came to pass last month: after Andrew Tridgell genially attempted to create his own little branch off the BitKeeper main trunk and start fiddling with it, Larry McVoy started thinking that maybe things were getting a little *too* distributed around here, and attempted to merge things back into the bottle. The merge failed spectacularly, and Linus Torvalds was forced to manually choose between two source branches--McVoy's way, or the open highway. A hideous three-way merge with a very long and twisty changeset history indeed...."
