Git is only 12 years old, how does Linux have 25 years of history there? As far as I know Linux used patches on mailing lists before git, are those also somehow transferred to the repo?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3264283/linux-kernel-his...
https://landley.net/kdocs/fullhist/
The first link describes using git's "grafts" feature to make the UI believe that the first commit in the normal repo actually has parents, which means you can use the repo normally and agree with everyone else about commit numbers, but also `git log` will go all the way back to Linux 0.0.1. I had this setup on my work machine in 2012 and it was useful a few times, but in the last couple of years I haven't really needed to see history past 2.6.12.
(But yes, the history repos don't explain the size of the normal linux.git repo - except to the extent that you need to spend over a decade writing an OS to get even that many lines of code in the first commit and that much activity shortly thereafter.)
commit 1da177e4c3f41524e886b7f1b8a0c1fc7321cac2 (tag: refs/tags/v2.6.12-rc2)
Author: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@ppc970.osdl.org>
Date: Sat Apr 16 15:20:36 2005 -0700
Linux-2.6.12-rc2
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!Given that conceptually git is just a linked list of patches, I can't imagine why they wouldn't have that history
You can construct a linked list of patches for any series of commits, but git doesn't actually store patches or diffs - only raw content.