"If you are planning to learn filesystems, start from the scratch. You can look from the first commit in this repository and move the way up."

Slightly off topic - I've always thought this is a very interesting use case for Github and open source in general - especially for understanding such low level concepts and their implementations. Provided the commit history is clear and comprehensive, this might be the best way to learn, other than do the whole thing yourself from scratch. Has somebody actually taken this path? What's your experience?

If I recall it is like 500-ish lines of code, compiles easily, and is runnable. It makes a little .git folder. It's only the "plumbing" of git, back when it was a "content tracker".

Linus used to brag that it was self hosting in 3 days or something like that, and presumably this is what he was talking about.

It helps you understand the design of git for sure, and gave me an appreciation for Linus's coding style. I didn't really think he had a great sense of style because Linux is known to be somewhat of a smorgasbord. Git itself also has a sloppy and confusing interface IMO, but that's a different issue.

I didn't follow it any further than the first commit, but I bet you could learn a lot that way. (You would also presumably see how nobody designed the interface and it just accumulated commands and flags in a haphazard fashion)