What you have in title of the post, body of the post and in this screenshot all disagree with each other.

Use backtics to quote code fragments. Tripple backtics to block quote. You should be able to edit your post.

Unless you go in with a byte editor, you can’t change Mercurial’s commit history. I didn’t say “fabricate”, I said “change”.

In git you also cannot change history of a commit. You can only create a new commit with a new history. You’re arguing about semantics which don’t change the end result.

The point is, with Mercurial it would be hard and the result would be utterly incompatible with any other clone of the repo: there would be no way to propagate your changes to other clones. With git, this is a standard workflow.

As the example under discussion demonstrates, it’s also impossible to propagate the changes to git clones. Since history changed, merging the pull requests shows all the differences. That’s how Linus noticed the issue.

Well, that’s kind of his personality though.

Yes. Linus is known to overreact and use colourful language.

If it was compromised account trying to sneak code into the kernel, the attacker wouldn’t rewrite history since that would be obviously flagged when Linus tries to merge the pull request; as demonstrated by Linus in fact noticing the rewritten history. There was virtually no chance that this was an attack.

Unless commits are signed, you can always rewrite history. No matter the tool. Extreme example demonstrating that this is possible is the fact that I can change my machine’s time, change my user name and reply the tool’s commands to construct whatever history I want.

It was in fact a microscopic deal. Linus overreacted. Lemmy and Reddit milked the drama.