For Techies Only: What Was Elon Musk Trying to Say With His Cryptic Tweet about Git and Subversion?

PJ Media ^ | 11/06/2022 | Charlie Martin

[SeekAndFind]

Elon Musk, with the Twitter acquisition, is now the subject of much attention by the general public. Elon is not shy about saying whatever he wants — and being a computer-nerd genius with more money than King Charles III and his late mom, he is sometimes a little obscure.

Like today:

pic.twitter.com/4UQlClBSct

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 5, 2022

This one was puzzling enough that the editors asked me for a translation. “Version control” is the way software developers keep track of changes in order to make sure you know what’s changed in case you f—— something up. Your version control is what lets you backtrack so that you have a chance to cover up fix the problem. The joke is that the top tool, git, is pretty much the current state of the art. Subversion is the most common previous version control tool. The bottom picture is a bunch of files with ad hoc file names and no other version control at all. So the “real” version control there is the least powerful, oldest method of all. (Well, if we count duplicate card desks as the same thing.)

Some of you may remember when Mudge, famous hacker and security consultant, testified to Congress. He said Twitter’s security practices were “ten years out of date.” Well, git is the industry standard version control. Subversion was 20 years ago, and some other tools date back to the late ’70s.

Making copies of files is even older. Is Elon saying that’s the state of Twitter’s code? If so, he may have bigger problems than dealing with a bunch of abusive snowflakes.

[spintreebob]

No severance pay? Check how much they will get from now to Feb 2023 without doing a thing except obeying the Twitter handbook?

[MarthaInKilgore]

I suspect the coders weren’t lazy but this lousy system helps hide their deceptive clean up before the transition. ... all the code that did the dirty deeds has been removed and those old folders deleted.

[nicollo]

Makes sense. Tks for posting.

[Nervous Tick]

>> “Subversion” is older and more primitive but was respectable in it’s day.

Heh... that’s what I use. As opposed to my customers’ “no source control at all”. :-)

Oh well, I’m dated. So what... retirement is just around the corner.

[ClearCase_guy]

I started with CVS, and that’s one step behind Subversion. But I haven’t actually used any real revision control tool for many years. Which is a shame.

[Prolixus]

Just thinking about this it does make sense. If Twitter is extremely paranoid about the possibility of outsiders reading their source code and they don’t have resources to develop version control software in-house, the old method of backing up changes by manually changing file names is a simple low cost solution.