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Look, new projects should have these pages, and they SHOULD be passionate and biased. However, shit like this makes me stop reading: "Git has a huge user comm

Look, new projects should have these pages, and they SHOULD be passionate and biased. However, shit like this makes me stop reading: "Git has a huge user community. If following the herd and being like everybody else is important to you, then you should choose Git."

steevdave 15y ago
I logged in to make the same comment. If you want someone to use your product, the best way to do that isn't to call them sheep
- Johngibb 15y ago
  I agree... I think that making the argument "try fossil because no one else uses it" is just as bad as recommending using git because everyone does. Why not judge it on it's merits?
  - jasonwatkinspdx 15y ago
    Wide usage is a merit. If you know git you can contribute to any project on github more easily. That is an advantage, though it would be utterly foolish to make your choice solely on this point.
wccrawford 15y ago
Agreed. Having a small community and not being well-known are not advantages. They try to say that your voice will be comparatively louder and you'll get more attention from the developers, but in a large community, you get attention from the community as well. The only thing you can get from using an unpopular project is an adrenaline rush from living on the edge.
- stonemetal 15y ago
  Having a small community and not being well-known are not advantages. I am not sure I can agree with this. Smaller communities are often nicer. Think of all the talk around here of growing pains, loss of niceness, comparisons to Reddit or Dig, eternal September, etc. that have come about as the community grows.
  - gabrielroth 15y ago
    That's one way in which a discussion community like HN is different from an open-source product-user community.
    - stonemetal 15y ago
      Open source projects have a very similar problem. When there were 20 people in the Linux community they could all be considered kernel hackers and communicate amongst themselves, now that there are millions they can't assume every member of the community is a kernel hacker, the 'kernel hacker' ability of the average community member has fallen.
wladimir 15y ago
Oh no, not another SCM. My head is already bursting from learning Hg and Git... Also I don't think "lack of rebase" is a feature. If you don't want it in git, just forbid using it for your project. However, if you want to maintain a patch-set outside of a project it's the best thing since sliced bread.
- gecko 15y ago
  Fossil's solution to that are private branches and stashes. That said, I'm with you in preferring rebasing for this kind of thing. (And I'm not even a Git user; I'm pretty wedded to Mercurial.)
  - StavrosK 15y ago
    I used to use bzr, then I used git and was blown away by the speed. I switched to it, still learning the (very hairy) commands, but really enjoying the speed. One day, I tried hg by chance and discovered it was as fast as git and as sensible as bar :( Now I have no idea what to use.
chc 15y ago
It also backs this point up with yet another abuse of the most misquoted poem ever, Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." The poem isn't actually in praise of making unusual choices — it's about rationalizing the choices we make so that they seem more intelligent and important than they actually were. In the text of the poem, the narrator goes to great lengths to make it clear that he can't tell any difference between the paths in front of him. So he decides to choose one arbitrarily, and tells us that years from now, he'll tell people that he took this little-traveled road and that set the course of his life.
- gjm11 15y ago
  He kinda contradicts himself. "Then took the other, as just as fair, / And having perhaps the better claim, / Because it was grassy and wanted wear;" seems to imply that the one he took was indeed "less traveled"; but then, immediately, "Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same,". It doesn't seem to me that there's any Right Answer to the question: Are we supposed to understand that the path he took really was less-travelled, or not? My reading of the last stanza differs from yours: he's not saying that he'll tell people, falsely, that it set the course of his life; he's saying that although he couldn't see any good reason for choosing one over the other, as his life goes on it'll turn out that it made a big difference. The thing that intrigues me about this poem (which, actually, I don't much care for despite its fame) is the title. "The road not taken". That's not the perhaps-less-worn path he did take, it's the other one. Without that title, if you asked me which path was more the subject of the poem I'd have said without hesitation: the one he took, which "has made all the difference". But no: the spotlight is on that sigh with which Frost will be telling the story, the regret (if that's the right word) that he couldn't try them both. I think.
  - chc 15y ago
    It doesn't seem like a real contradiction — it can be easily harmonized as an ironic way of saying they were identical, but he wanted there to be some difference. From the description, can you tell me which road he took? I agree with you on the title though. It puts a really nice spin on the poem.
mgkimsal 15y ago
"following the herd"? Yeah, git's had a lot of adoption (methinks primarily due to github), but I work with loads of people who are just getting up to speed with subversion. VCS of any type gives them a headache - "distributed" is even worse. Some client's I worked with in 2010 had no version control at all. "Following the herd" seems a little myopic. :)
rahoulb 15y ago
The real problem with that statement is that version control doesn't exist in isolation. If you're the only person using Fossil it's useless to you (I hate git but I have to work with others)

steevdave 15y ago

I logged in to make the same comment. If you want someone to use your product, the best way to do that isn't to call them sheep

Johngibb 15y ago
I agree... I think that making the argument "try fossil because no one else uses it" is just as bad as recommending using git because everyone does. Why not judge it on it's merits?
- jasonwatkinspdx 15y ago
  Wide usage is a merit. If you know git you can contribute to any project on github more easily. That is an advantage, though it would be utterly foolish to make your choice solely on this point.

wccrawford 15y ago

Agreed. Having a small community and not being well-known are not advantages. They try to say that your voice will be comparatively louder and you'll get more attention from the developers, but in a large community, you get attention from the community as well. The only thing you can get from using an unpopular project is an adrenaline rush from living on the edge.

stonemetal 15y ago
Having a small community and not being well-known are not advantages. I am not sure I can agree with this. Smaller communities are often nicer. Think of all the talk around here of growing pains, loss of niceness, comparisons to Reddit or Dig, eternal September, etc. that have come about as the community grows.
- gabrielroth 15y ago
  That's one way in which a discussion community like HN is different from an open-source product-user community.
  - stonemetal 15y ago
    Open source projects have a very similar problem. When there were 20 people in the Linux community they could all be considered kernel hackers and communicate amongst themselves, now that there are millions they can't assume every member of the community is a kernel hacker, the 'kernel hacker' ability of the average community member has fallen.

wladimir 15y ago

Oh no, not another SCM. My head is already bursting from learning Hg and Git... Also I don't think "lack of rebase" is a feature. If you don't want it in git, just forbid using it for your project. However, if you want to maintain a patch-set outside of a project it's the best thing since sliced bread.

gecko 15y ago
Fossil's solution to that are private branches and stashes. That said, I'm with you in preferring rebasing for this kind of thing. (And I'm not even a Git user; I'm pretty wedded to Mercurial.)
- StavrosK 15y ago
  I used to use bzr, then I used git and was blown away by the speed. I switched to it, still learning the (very hairy) commands, but really enjoying the speed. One day, I tried hg by chance and discovered it was as fast as git and as sensible as bar :( Now I have no idea what to use.

chc 15y ago

It also backs this point up with yet another abuse of the most misquoted poem ever, Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." The poem isn't actually in praise of making unusual choices — it's about rationalizing the choices we make so that they seem more intelligent and important than they actually were. In the text of the poem, the narrator goes to great lengths to make it clear that he can't tell any difference between the paths in front of him. So he decides to choose one arbitrarily, and tells us that years from now, he'll tell people that he took this little-traveled road and that set the course of his life.

gjm11 15y ago
He kinda contradicts himself. "Then took the other, as just as fair, / And having perhaps the better claim, / Because it was grassy and wanted wear;" seems to imply that the one he took was indeed "less traveled"; but then, immediately, "Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same,". It doesn't seem to me that there's any Right Answer to the question: Are we supposed to understand that the path he took really was less-travelled, or not? My reading of the last stanza differs from yours: he's not saying that he'll tell people, falsely, that it set the course of his life; he's saying that although he couldn't see any good reason for choosing one over the other, as his life goes on it'll turn out that it made a big difference. The thing that intrigues me about this poem (which, actually, I don't much care for despite its fame) is the title. "The road not taken". That's not the perhaps-less-worn path he did take, it's the other one. Without that title, if you asked me which path was more the subject of the poem I'd have said without hesitation: the one he took, which "has made all the difference". But no: the spotlight is on that sigh with which Frost will be telling the story, the regret (if that's the right word) that he couldn't try them both. I think.
- chc 15y ago
  It doesn't seem like a real contradiction — it can be easily harmonized as an ironic way of saying they were identical, but he wanted there to be some difference. From the description, can you tell me which road he took? I agree with you on the title though. It puts a really nice spin on the poem.

mgkimsal 15y ago

"following the herd"? Yeah, git's had a lot of adoption (methinks primarily due to github), but I work with loads of people who are just getting up to speed with subversion. VCS of any type gives them a headache - "distributed" is even worse. Some client's I worked with in 2010 had no version control at all. "Following the herd" seems a little myopic. :)

rahoulb 15y ago

The real problem with that statement is that version control doesn't exist in isolation. If you're the only person using Fossil it's useless to you (I hate git but I have to work with others)