Subject: Re: Cease and desist for companies and government agencies misusing git

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2025 10:39:00 -0500

On Thu, Oct 30, 2025 at 04:27:10PM +0100, Mark Bauermeister wrote:
> Long story short. The guy who was responsible for my firing spent a
> good 4 months journaling my work and harassing management behind my
> back only to blow up while on the phone with me, accusing me of such
> heinous crimes as sending a PR from a fork (at a time I didn't have
> write access to the main repository...) and *gasp* REBASING.
> 
> This dude is convinced (to a religious fervor) that Linus Torvalds was
> possessed by a demon when he came up with `git rebase` and that in
> order to defeat the devil, we need to plaster merge commits
> EVERYWHERE.

That's nuts!

By the way, Linus did not invent rebasing.  We used rebasing at Sun
Microsystems, Inc, (RIP) since 1992.  We didn't call it that, but merge
commits were absolutely verboten (they were called "merge turds").

The Solaris engineering organization had thousands of developers, and
often tens of large projects with their own "gates" (forks), and
everyone rebasing all the time, and the end result was linear, easy to
understand history.

Rebase workflows are the only workflows that scale to such project
sizes as Solaris used to be, or as Windows, Linux, etc. are now.

Nico
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