[ Thanks to Steve
Mallett for this link. ]
“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….”