And if there's one thing that will deter lawyers, it's confusing terminology.

There are luddites and then there is the legal community.

I think we can get them on board. Need to rebrand some things with latin terminology, that's all. Let them file a petitio tracto instead of making a pull request.

I think svn is a better way of thinking when working with documents, the fact that the timeline is contiguous too helps

you can easily have a contiguous git timeline if you want to

is a376f1 older or newer than 89fa2b?

The lack of continuous versioning is a problem for most document like workflows.

The commit message doesn't encode the timeline in neither git nor svn, and no-one complains.

So why do you expect the git hash to encode the timeline?

Git encodes the timeline in the parent/child relationship of commits (and/or the date stamps). Trying to look for the timeline information in the hashes is going to be futile, that's not where it's supposed to be found.

For documents that get send back and forth via email, amongst more than 2 participants, git's DAG is actually a better representation than a linear timeline.

(But yes, if you don't like that, you can set up git to reject commits with more than one parent to enforce a linear history.)

My advice to people who want history-tracking but don't know how to use a version-control system is: use Dropbox or OneDrive (I think Google Drive has something similar).

You get 30 days of history for every file in Dropbox (120 days for Business users). Earlier you could pay a bit extra to get a full year of history -- but that feature, called Extended Version History, is no longer available.

OneDrive unfortunately offers only 30 days, I believe Google Drive is similar.

Wonder if one can create a new repo and commit the revisions with original Authors' names and historical date.

That would make a lot of sense to folks who are unfamiliar with hit.... also me.