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Ask HN: Why isn't there a distributed source control standard?
Recently BitBucket announced they are stopping support Mercurial -- https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-mercurial-support-in-bitbucket -- which has a lot of devs in a minor panic to get their repos converted in time.
But what if distributed source control relied on a standard set of protocols and contracts rather than a specific implementation? This would allow numerous implementations that all adhere to the same contracts and protocols and allow for some creative freedom -- and productivity enhancements -- in individual implementations.
Competition brings about improvement; in world where it's Git or nothing then the state of tooling stagnates.
- tomohawk 7y agoLike WebDAV? There are a few problems with standards. One is that there are so many of them, and another is that once set, they tend to impede progress or the adoption of better ways of doing things. Hg lost out to Git, and for the foreseeable future, git is probably going to hold sway. There was a similar era where, at least in corporate areas, ClearCase was the thing to use. Thank goodness those days are gone.
- wmf 7y agoThe git protocol is the standard; feel free to build different tooling on it. https://hg-git.github.io/ https://hg-git.github.io/
- mooreds 7y agoYes, it's all about the tooling now.