alt Hacker News“a medium customarily used for software interchange“
Interesting choice of cropping for that quote.
If you had included the previous word, it would be blindly obvious that “on a medium“ is only talking about the transport layer, not the format of the data. So it would exclude distributing source code on tape, or even optical discs, as nobody uses those anymore. About the only medium used for source code distribution these days is “the internet”
You could potentially stretch this to excluding google drive, though google will argue that the medium is http, not google drive; But you can’t stretch this to requiring it be formatted as git.
And even if you did manage to successfully argue that, google would just ship it as one (tagged) commit per release. The history would still be missing.
> If you had included the previous word, it would be blindly obvious that “on a medium“ is only talking about the transport layer, not the format of the data.
I can see your point. But OTOH if providing the "preferred form of the work for making modifications" requires not squashing commits into a big mess to frustrate someone trying to make sense of the code (I'm sure the Google engineers making modifications prefer to look at individual commits!), and Google is using Git anyway to create those commits, then it seems to me like there's an argument to be made that the customary medium used to interchange a range of Git commits is Git.
But the stronger argument is that the Android build system expects everything to be in Git: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49368983