Two decades of Git: A conversation with creator Linus Torvalds
GitHubRecommended by 1 HN commenter across 1 month, 2025–2026
interview · general · evergreen · 2025–2026 on HN
GitHub interviews Linus Torvalds on twenty years of Git, from its creation in about ten days as a Linux kernel tool to its role in modern software development. He discusses technical decisions, community contributions and the project's philosophy.
HN commenters cite it for Linus's direct opinions on Git and development tooling, such as calling the SHA-256 migration pointless churn.
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3 comments from Hacker News
I watched this YouTube video Two decades of Git: A conversation with creator Linus Torvalds ▶ this video I was surprised that he only spent four months on it as a maintainer. What a great piece of work by a great software developer.
Aha, found it. No you're right it is his own hacked up emacs fork, but he does also say that it lacks color. Found it in the video here: ▶ this video
> changing from SHA-1 to SHA-256 for greater security Linus has a different view, he referred to the SHA-256 migration as "pointless churn": ▶ this video SHA-1 is not broken enough to be a serious issue for git. The migration to SHA-256 has been forced by on git by clueless morons, and it is, in this very special way, similar to the master-main rename.