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This is a pretty interesting writeup, even though I don’t necessarily agree with everything. Makes you think, at least. I’ve been out of version control for a
by holman 7y ago
This is a pretty interesting writeup, even though I don’t necessarily agree with everything. Makes you think, at least.
I’ve been out of version control for a bit, and GitHub itself for quite a bit longer, but this part was interesting to me:
> Because: It isn't really about Git anymore. GitHub used to be a Git repository hosting company. But now, they are about providing other software development and management infrastructure that augments the version control. They might as well change their name to Hub at this point.
Just for added color: starting around 2010 or 2011 or so (around when we added Subversion to GitHub), we had a pretty solid idea that version control wasn’t “the thing”. Mostly because Mercurial was a strong alternative, and there always felt like there might be something new in the wings that could dominate in the next few years. Version control felt really dynamic, and deeply susceptible to change. And if something was better, we’d totally ditch Git for the new thing. The name was a bit of a misnomer, from that perspective.
I think that changed over time — I had a hell of a time trying to get movement on basic version control improvements back in 2014 — and now they’re clearly much more about the ecosystem rather than version control itself. It’s where the money is, of course, but it’s also where the bigger innovation is, at least for the time being.
I think the author is right to say that Microsoft is targeting a different area than version control specifically, though you could argue if the outcome of that is good or bad. It’s certainly different, though- they’re especially growing headcount right now, and the company makeup is wildly different than what many customers tend think it is today, imo.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- souterrain 7y ago> Because: It isn't really about Git anymore. GitHub used to be a Git repository hosting company. But now, they are about providing other software development and management infrastructure that augments the version control. They might as well change their name to Hub at this point. I agree fully, but the one "feature" missing from drh's analysis is GitHub's social aspect. Getting code out in front of people and allowing them to interact with it (directly, via commits and PRs, or indirectly, via issue comments) as a feature of a social network is their differentiator. GitHub's choice of git wasn't germane to building a social network: GitHub could have been successful using svn, excepting that git was ascendant at the time. Fossil's feature of an integrated web server is an anti-feature to GitHub; it defeats the purpose of having a centralised "Hub."
- rkeene2 7y agoChiselApp.com provides a similar "Hub" for Fossil and it still serves a useful function in the Fossil community -- somewhere to host your Fossil repos. I've been thinking about adding CI/CD support and other tooling, but the CPU resources required would be cost prohibitive.
- StavrosK 7y agoI would love to use Fossil, but git is too entrenched. The only thing that would allow me to use it right now is basically automatic, two-way migration between git and Fossil, so I can use it locally and other devs can use Git, and we can all still use GitLab for the CI, etc. Unfortunately, this seems pretty hard to do, so I'm afraid git is too powerful. I absolutely detest its porcelain, but what can we do?
- saagarjha 7y agoI guess we could write better porcelain on top of it…
- rkeene2 7y agoFossil can be configured to do a bidirectional sync between git [0], with the exceptions noted here [1] -- but it may not be a good idea [2] and I've never set it up. [0] http://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/inout.wiki http://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/inout.wiki [1] http://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/mirrorlimitations.md http://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/mirrorlimitations.m... [2] http://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/mirrortogithub.md http://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/mirrortogithub.md "Notes" section