[cpks]

git and mercurial are a million times more clever than a state-of-the-art DCVS like bitkeeper. It's a new data structure. It's a brilliant data structure. It's robust in ways even distributed databases aren't. It's fast. It's simple. It's clean. It's elegant.

git made several additional breakthroughs in terms of working in terms of snapshots instead of diffsets, keeping much less data, and performing many computations late rather than early. In essence, these result in a system infinitely more flexible and expandable than prior version control systems. Adding new ways to change the source code in CVS required a whole new data format (SVN). In git, that's a minor change.

The full power of git hasn't been anywhere close to exploited yet. The data model is very general-purpose, fast, and robust. It can do much more than just source control.