procrastination diagram

Things like this are why revision control systems should be mandatory in free software projects. It would be nice if we weren't relying entirely on Linus's memory.

A revision control system really wouldn't have helped, since it still doesn't tell you the source of the code that has been checked in. At that point, you're still relying on the memory of the person who wrote it where they got the code from...

All a revision control system will tell you is when code was checked in (and since Linus was releasing new kernels every few days, this would give you only a slightly smaller granuality in time) and maybe a checkin comment. But that isn't necessarily going to tell you whether the author wrote the code himself or cribbed it from some other project.

True. But it seems to me that "I remember doing this, and look, it appeared between these versions" is not as good as "I remember doing this, and look, these logs say someone logge in as me checked it in that day."

This is likely my personal bias, though.