I think it's worth noting that git did not replace tarballs and patches. Git replaced Bitkeeper. Bitkeeper, as far as I know, replaced tarballs and patches. And as far as I know, git did not start as a bunch of scripts for dealing with tarballs and patches. The design was inspired by his knowledge of and experience with Bitkeeper.
The workflow was indeed inspired by Bitkeeper, nothing is truly revolutionary, but Bitkeeper itself was not the status quo in a world dominated by CVS, SVN and Perforce.
So I'm writing some scripts to try to track
things a whole lot faster. Initial indications
are that I should be able to do it almost as
quickly as I can just apply the patch, but
quite frankly, I'm at most half done, and if I
hit a snag maybe that's not true at all.
Anyway, the reason I can do it quickly is that
my scripts will _not_ be an SCM, they'll be a
very specific "log Linus' state" kind of thing.
That will make the linear patch merge a lot more
time-efficient, and thus possible.
Bitkeeper was not the status quo, but I don't think that's important in the overall point. The original point was that git was inspired by previous software. The original software pointed at, cvs, was wrong, but I don't think the original point changes when we put the correct software, Bitkeeper, in its place in the sentence.
