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Sort of - DVCS did not have nearly as much general uptake before Git and Mercurial caught public attention, and none of the options available met Torvalds' feat
by rincebrain 10y ago
Sort of - DVCS did not have nearly as much general uptake before Git and Mercurial caught public attention, and none of the options available met Torvalds' featureset requirements.
BitKeeper existed, a few projects used darcs, GNU arch and monotone existed but I don't think I ever encountered a project using either (the Canonical arch fork aside), and that's mostly a wrap for free or Free options.
He may not be the father of a novel concept which he could write a paper about, but Git and Mercurial existing certainly coincided with the enormous uptick in DVCS usage and visibility.
I suppose the difference in opinion about the term "father" just comes down to being about the theory behind the problem space or wildly successful implementation, and IMO "taking known solutions and putting them together in a more successful way" is novel enough to claim credit.
- _pmf_ 10y agoBitKeeper could have become GitHub + git in one entity if they made the client and hosting for FOSS free and charged for on-premises servers or private repos.
- Swizec 10y agoBut they didn't.
- jacobush 10y agoThey were stuck in a local optimum.
- gcp 10y agoDue to the ubiquity of git (and github) we (the users) are in the same case today.
- pjmlp 10y agoSadly with a much worse UX, as usual.
- rincebrain 10y agoA number of people have written nicer UXes for git, both CLI and GUI, but none of them have achieved critical mass that I've seen so far.
- pjmlp 10y agoThe critical mass only happened, because it is written by Linus and a must have for anyone working with the Linux source code. I very much doubt it would have succeed if it wasn't for those two factors. As such I would put it on the same basket as C, PHP and JavaScript, regarding adoption vs quality. As for Github, it is just the new Sourceforge, helped by the way they mismanaged it.
- _pmf_ 10y ago> As for Github, it is just the new Sourceforge, helped by the way they mismanaged it. Agreed; when GitHub is bought by the wrong company (when; not if), we'll be in a world of shit.
- gcp 10y agoIt's again due to the ubiquity. Even if I get stuck in a git UX hellhole, I can do a google search and be 99% sure the top result is a StackOverflow post explaining the steps needed to recover.
- j1vms 10y ago> Due to the ubiquity of git (...) we (the users) are in the same case today. Github aside, in what ways does git fall shorts of your expectation as a user? Maybe there are alternatives for you to use, but we need some clarity to decide whether they exist or not.
- gcp 10y agoI used git for many years, and actually still use it extensively to collaborate with git projects, but in the last year or so Mercurial and several of the modern plugins for it have opened my eyes that git is stuck in 10 year old ideas of how DVCS should work. I used to criticize Mercurial for their half-assed branching, lack of history editing and the refusal to admit that git got this right. But Mercurial has improved (bookmarks, histedit, etc) and git has not, so my feelings have entirely reversed now.
- j1vms 10y agoI will revisit 'hg' a little bit myself again to see how it and its ecosystem has evolved. Thanks for the recommendation.