Why was GAR written?
The BBC is required by the GPL to provide a written offer for the source code to many of the applications on the CD. Unfortunately, the original BBCs were slapped together rather haphazardly, and many applications were taken from existing Linux distros in binary form! The tarball of source code that was distributed from the old Web site was not enough for users to build their own BBC, and this disappointed many prospective developers. In addition to this, the disk space required to store all of our development versions of the BBC was quickly growing as a result of the “big fat tree of binaries” method of development. There was no revision control, and no logging of changes. Typically everything would be a scramble to get a gold image out the door before a trade show or other release deadline. The process of taking a tree of files and directories and making a compressed loopback bootable iso from it was pretty well automated, but there was no good way of getting the tree into the proper
