I came across an interesting transcript of a presentation today. Linus Torvalds, of Linux Kernel fame, gave a presentation at Google discussing the good, the bad, and the ugly, of source code revision management. His general mantra is "You are all stupid and ugly", but that being said he has an interesting take on source code repositories as well as discussing the specifics of his custom open source repo, "git".

While the talk was actually quite interesting to read from a personality point of view (Linus is never short on jabs and opinions), it is also interesting to read from a repository point of view. It never really occurred to me how much a centralized source code management system could be improved upon. It has been in use for so many years, it's just one of those things that you assume is being done right. I guess it makes sense to never assume (You think I'd have learned that by now).

One quote that caught my eye:

"If you have ever done any security work, and it did not involve the concept of network of trust, then it wasn't a security work, it was masturbation. I don't know what you were doing but trust me, it's the only way you can do security, and it's the only way you can do development. The way I work, I don't trust everybody. in fact I am a very cynical and untrusting person. I think most of you are completely incompetent."

I guess I'm not only incompetent, but according to Linus I masturbate for a living! If you can get past the attitude, it's a pretty interesting take on a very old topic.