5 ms·

A much better UI. Git won because of the influence of the Linux kernel developers, that's all.

by jmercouris 6y ago

xyst 6y ago
The influence of a single linux kernel developer is the reason it's adoption is so high - Linus Torvalds.
- tux1968 6y ago
  That's much too simplistic. For instance Linus also denounces C++ and programmers don't fall into line behind him on that front. He is influential, but could not have caused the monumental shift in version control without producing a phenomenal tool to do the job. Git largely won on its overall merit, despite having some obvious UI warts.
- kbenson 6y ago
  Eh, that's a bit reductionist. Git was developed by Tovalds because BitKeeper had shortcomings he kept grating against, and it really needed to be a DVCS for kernel development. So he created something that fit the kernel development needs well, and it happened to also fit the needs of other companies as well. That it was free and open source was icing on the cake. That Torvalds created it just meant that there was already a wide audience of people willing to consider it and give it a fair shake initially. I'm sure it didn't hurt that Torvalds had many years of experience dealing with lots of the shortcomings of different version control systems and their shortcomings in what is probably one of the more extreme version control situations, and is also known for optimizing the hard parts of things. It was really the perfect storm for good open source software. A highly skilled developer with massive amounts of domain experience that is highly motivated to solve the problem. What you often get in those situations is something that is an obvious step up from the status quo, at least of free offerings, and often matching the paid offerings if they are more advanced. If it wasn't Torvalds, it just would have taken longer to take over.
  - rleigh 6y ago
    As you say, it can't be understated just how much of a conceptual leap git was. It wasn't developed in a vacuum. And there were several interesting distributed open source version control systems around at the time. After moving on from CVS and Subversion, I tried using Arch (tla) for a project. It was interesting, but still tied to the old way of thinking of version control as a series of deltas, both in its conceptual model and in its storage implementation. In fact, its storage was a tarball of a "base revision" plus a series of patches. Checking out a branch meant unpacking the tarball and applying patches in sequence. It was distributed, and elegant in its own way, but it didn't make the conceptual leap which Linus took with git. In contrast, the hash-based blob/tree/commit model of git was groundbreaking. The storage doesn't use deltas (except as an implementation detail--as an optimisation in pack files). Deltas are computed on demand. Operations on and synchronising between blob stores is simple and fast. That one change is what made git revolutionary. It opened the door for doing so much more with the version control system. Still, others took that step around the same time, and the git interface is not what one would call intuitive. But for various reasons it had the momentum and took the crown. It's not perfect, but it's still an absolutely superb tool.
danbolt 6y ago
I feel like GitHub made a lot of hacking around and software development a lot more seamless too. Before GitHub, the average state of software development seemed a bit more clunky to me.
- qbasic_forever 6y ago
  Github made _Github style_ development seamless--i.e. centralized source control, slick web UI instead of CLI focus, pull requests instead of e-mailed patches. It's one of many different ways to build software though and it's a fallacy to say the entire field of software development didn't move forward until it existed. For someone who has only known Github style development it's true, but for many projects (including some of the largest in the world like the Linux kernel, all of Google's internal code, etc.) Github style development isn't necessary.
  - danbolt 6y ago
    > it's a fallacy to say the entire field of software development didn't move forward until it existed I mean, like, it kinda did in some ways? I feel like GitHub's semi-centralized web UI and pull requests empowered a lot of people to engage in software development online that wouldn't otherwise. I think if it didn't, we wouldn't see value in GitLab and Gittea providing GitHub's accessibility in a more decentralized way.
  - lmm 6y ago
    > it's a fallacy to say the entire field of software development didn't move forward until it existed A lot of software development got a lot better. Yes, software development was possible before GitHub, but it lowered the barrier to entry a lot.
folkrav 6y ago
> A much better UI Curious as how it's "better". I have in all honestly only ever used git.
- ufo 6y ago
  One thing I prefer about Mercurial is that it doesn't have a separate staging area. To create a new commit in git you need to run `git add` followed by `git commit`. In Mercurial it's just `hg commit`. Furthermore, if you want to look at the diff in git sometimes it's `git diff` and sometimes you need to run `git diff --cached`. Now, I'm sure there are antsy git users in this forum ready to reply about how great the staging area is because of `git add -p`. I would note that you can also do those things in Hg if you want. For example, the `shelve` command in Hg is analogous to `git stash -p`. If you want to commit only part of the changes you can shelve away the things that you don't want to commit for now. One thing I like about this workflow compared to the staging area is that if you run your test suite, the code that is being tested in your working directory is the same one that will be commited.
  - acdha 6y ago
    > To create a new commit in git you need to run `git add` followed by `git commit`. Or `git commit -a` — and if you're making commits that frequently it'll be in your shell history anyway.
    - lmm 6y ago
      Except that if you added a new file then "git commit -a" will miss it out. Git's UI is full of little sharp edges like that. You get used to them, but it's just needlessly fiddly to start with.
      - acdha 6y ago
        > Except that if you added a new file then "git commit -a" will miss it out. Exactly like Mercurial, you mean? Try it if you haven't in a while: you have to call “hg add” to add a new file or you'll get “nothing changed” when you run "hg commit". The reason why neither of them has a default “add everything in the current directory” mode is that this is how you end up with repositories containing temporary files, build artifacts, and secrets. This is not a good example to base ”much better UI” claims on.
formerly_proven 6y ago
Git is and always was very fast. Hg used to be much much slower, and still is.
- lifthrasiir 6y ago
  Both were still very faster than the mainstream solution at the time that is Subversion. I don't think Git could achieve the domination comparable to today without Github for that reason.
- gmueckl 6y ago
  Mercurial beats git in a fair bechmark on a large repository by now. As far as I know, no other DVCS received similar dedicated optimizations. (Microsoft worked around git by shimming a fake file system driver below the local repository to make it scale enouth to cover the Windows codebase. It's all Windows exclusive and not part of git, so it doesn't really count).
  - ammo1662 6y ago
    They asked to add it to Git, however they are rejected.
dialamac 6y ago
I mean git is wildly popular because of GitHub, and probably that was something to do with it in the Rails community... a community that if anything is culturally the opposite of the kernel dev community (or at least very different). I don’t think any kernel dev influence had to do with it, even though it’s often stated as a fact.
- pdw 6y ago
  No, even at the time of GitHub's founding Git was already the clear winner. Think about it, why did GitHub feel safe launching with only Git support, while its competitors (Google Code, Bitbucket, SourceForge) had support for multiple VCSs?
  - simonw 6y ago
    Disagree. Git wasn't the clear winner when GitHub launched - and in fact the entire category of distributed version control was still proving itself. I remember the GitHub team investing huge amounts of effort into convincing people to use git and teaching them how to do it - one of the four co-founders (Scott) was dedicated to that effort full-time.
    - Person5478 6y ago
      git was the clear winner when github released.
      - mikey_p 6y ago
        Not really, lots of folks were using mercurial with BitBucket which didn't support Git at the time. Bazaar and Launchpad were also pretty common. I remember at one point around 2009-2010 I was semi-regularly using CVS, Subversion, Mercurial, Bazaar and Git.
        Person5478 6y ago
        lots of people were using lots of things at that time, most were using git.
acdha 6y ago
Kind of — I started using Mercurial before using Git and found a number of things which were easier or only possible using Git. Using some of the plugins for things like rebase were the only time I've ever lost data in a version control system. By the time they had addressed some of those gaps, almost all of the projects I used had moved to GitHub, which seemed to be far more of a driver than Linux.
eikenberry 6y ago
If I remember correctly Mercurial also made some dubious decisions early on (which they later reversed) that hurt adoption, like no in-repo branches and no ability to change history.
- oblio 6y ago
  > no ability to change history. This is a version control misfeature/bad practice. It's almost the single version control system that has it as part of its regular commands (though others allow it, generally as part of an admin set of permissions and usually with super clear warnings not to do it). And it's far from a reason why git won. Git won because it was written by Torvalds and every script kiddie dreams to be a Linux kernel hacker and because the Facebook for Code, Github, took off and it was based on git. Heck, I'd "accuse" you of rewriting history right now :-))
- bsder 6y ago
  Mercurial also made the really good decision to support Windows long before git was even functional there. I've got clients who have been using Mercurial on Windows for more than 10 years now. They email bundles to each other and have no problems, whatsoever, and don't even notice git. One quote: "Why would I want to go back to a central repository that I have to be connected to? That's stupid." Most Windows users, sadly, are simply too backward to use anything that isn't tightly integrated into the Microsoft ecosystem. So, it never really helped Mercurial that much. GitHub, however, was what drove git. Unfortunately, Github is to source control as PowerPoint is to presentations. It works--but it's a dumbed-down default and nobody thinks about the fact that there are sometimes much better alternatives for your use case.
  - blt 6y ago
    Not sure I understand the analogy. What is PowerPoint a dumbed-down version of?
    - bsder 6y ago
      An actual textual report? Whiteboards? Overheads? Actual slides? Flip charts? Livecoding? Powerpoint is optimized for marketing and not much else. It exists because of two reasons: 1) Most people actively suck at presenting something. Forcing them to put their presentation in Powerpoint-standard forces some level of organization on them. 2) A lot of business presentation IS marketing--and Powerpoint is fine for that. The problem is that a lot of technical communication really doesn't fit into Powerpoint-standard (see: space-shuttle disasters for example). The problem is that now nobody knows how to do anything else and never even thinks about doing anything else.
johannes1234321 6y ago
Not only that, but GitHub came early and made the hosting easy. There was no similar offering for hg that early on.
- qbasic_forever 6y ago
  Github wasn't created until 2008, and in those early days there were big limits on hosting (very limited number of repos per user, even public ones). The everything free, everything easy all you can eat buffet that you see on Github today is a much more recent change. Back in '05 almost everything OSS was on source forge and Google Code, both of which offered super easy hosting, discussions, etc.
  - johannes1234321 6y ago
    Sourceforge was already in demise, it was slow etc. when was it that they started adding malware? Don't remember ... i however remember Chris Wnastrath travelling to europe even for relatively small developer events and sponsoring the beer events. Quite a good marketing ...
- tomjakubowski 6y ago
  Circa 2011, Bitbucket was Hg-only and pretty comparable to GitHub in repository hosting features at the time. Took a bit to dig up with Google their 2011 announcement that they're now also supporting Git. https://bitbucket.org/blog/bitbucket-now-rocks-git https://bitbucket.org/blog/bitbucket-now-rocks-git
asiachick 6y ago
git won because it's default workflow is better than hg's hg added stuff to match git's workflow but it isn't hg's default. The tutorials for hg all teach a decidedly inferior workflow to git. ps: did a 20 person year long project in hg first, next project was git. Not going back if I can help it.

A much better UI. Git won because of the influence of the Linux kernel developers, that's all.

xyst 6y ago

The influence of a single linux kernel developer is the reason it's adoption is so high - Linus Torvalds.

tux1968 6y ago
That's much too simplistic. For instance Linus also denounces C++ and programmers don't fall into line behind him on that front. He is influential, but could not have caused the monumental shift in version control without producing a phenomenal tool to do the job. Git largely won on its overall merit, despite having some obvious UI warts.
kbenson 6y ago
Eh, that's a bit reductionist. Git was developed by Tovalds because BitKeeper had shortcomings he kept grating against, and it really needed to be a DVCS for kernel development. So he created something that fit the kernel development needs well, and it happened to also fit the needs of other companies as well. That it was free and open source was icing on the cake. That Torvalds created it just meant that there was already a wide audience of people willing to consider it and give it a fair shake initially. I'm sure it didn't hurt that Torvalds had many years of experience dealing with lots of the shortcomings of different version control systems and their shortcomings in what is probably one of the more extreme version control situations, and is also known for optimizing the hard parts of things. It was really the perfect storm for good open source software. A highly skilled developer with massive amounts of domain experience that is highly motivated to solve the problem. What you often get in those situations is something that is an obvious step up from the status quo, at least of free offerings, and often matching the paid offerings if they are more advanced. If it wasn't Torvalds, it just would have taken longer to take over.
- rleigh 6y ago
  As you say, it can't be understated just how much of a conceptual leap git was. It wasn't developed in a vacuum. And there were several interesting distributed open source version control systems around at the time. After moving on from CVS and Subversion, I tried using Arch (tla) for a project. It was interesting, but still tied to the old way of thinking of version control as a series of deltas, both in its conceptual model and in its storage implementation. In fact, its storage was a tarball of a "base revision" plus a series of patches. Checking out a branch meant unpacking the tarball and applying patches in sequence. It was distributed, and elegant in its own way, but it didn't make the conceptual leap which Linus took with git. In contrast, the hash-based blob/tree/commit model of git was groundbreaking. The storage doesn't use deltas (except as an implementation detail--as an optimisation in pack files). Deltas are computed on demand. Operations on and synchronising between blob stores is simple and fast. That one change is what made git revolutionary. It opened the door for doing so much more with the version control system. Still, others took that step around the same time, and the git interface is not what one would call intuitive. But for various reasons it had the momentum and took the crown. It's not perfect, but it's still an absolutely superb tool.

danbolt 6y ago

I feel like GitHub made a lot of hacking around and software development a lot more seamless too. Before GitHub, the average state of software development seemed a bit more clunky to me.

qbasic_forever 6y ago
Github made _Github style_ development seamless--i.e. centralized source control, slick web UI instead of CLI focus, pull requests instead of e-mailed patches. It's one of many different ways to build software though and it's a fallacy to say the entire field of software development didn't move forward until it existed. For someone who has only known Github style development it's true, but for many projects (including some of the largest in the world like the Linux kernel, all of Google's internal code, etc.) Github style development isn't necessary.
- danbolt 6y ago
  > it's a fallacy to say the entire field of software development didn't move forward until it existed I mean, like, it kinda did in some ways? I feel like GitHub's semi-centralized web UI and pull requests empowered a lot of people to engage in software development online that wouldn't otherwise. I think if it didn't, we wouldn't see value in GitLab and Gittea providing GitHub's accessibility in a more decentralized way.
- lmm 6y ago
  > it's a fallacy to say the entire field of software development didn't move forward until it existed A lot of software development got a lot better. Yes, software development was possible before GitHub, but it lowered the barrier to entry a lot.

folkrav 6y ago

> A much better UI Curious as how it's "better". I have in all honestly only ever used git.

ufo 6y ago
One thing I prefer about Mercurial is that it doesn't have a separate staging area. To create a new commit in git you need to run `git add` followed by `git commit`. In Mercurial it's just `hg commit`. Furthermore, if you want to look at the diff in git sometimes it's `git diff` and sometimes you need to run `git diff --cached`. Now, I'm sure there are antsy git users in this forum ready to reply about how great the staging area is because of `git add -p`. I would note that you can also do those things in Hg if you want. For example, the `shelve` command in Hg is analogous to `git stash -p`. If you want to commit only part of the changes you can shelve away the things that you don't want to commit for now. One thing I like about this workflow compared to the staging area is that if you run your test suite, the code that is being tested in your working directory is the same one that will be commited.
- acdha 6y ago
  > To create a new commit in git you need to run `git add` followed by `git commit`. Or `git commit -a` — and if you're making commits that frequently it'll be in your shell history anyway.
  - lmm 6y ago
    Except that if you added a new file then "git commit -a" will miss it out. Git's UI is full of little sharp edges like that. You get used to them, but it's just needlessly fiddly to start with.
    - acdha 6y ago
      > Except that if you added a new file then "git commit -a" will miss it out. Exactly like Mercurial, you mean? Try it if you haven't in a while: you have to call “hg add” to add a new file or you'll get “nothing changed” when you run "hg commit". The reason why neither of them has a default “add everything in the current directory” mode is that this is how you end up with repositories containing temporary files, build artifacts, and secrets. This is not a good example to base ”much better UI” claims on.

formerly_proven 6y ago

Git is and always was very fast. Hg used to be much much slower, and still is.

lifthrasiir 6y ago
Both were still very faster than the mainstream solution at the time that is Subversion. I don't think Git could achieve the domination comparable to today without Github for that reason.
gmueckl 6y ago
Mercurial beats git in a fair bechmark on a large repository by now. As far as I know, no other DVCS received similar dedicated optimizations. (Microsoft worked around git by shimming a fake file system driver below the local repository to make it scale enouth to cover the Windows codebase. It's all Windows exclusive and not part of git, so it doesn't really count).
- ammo1662 6y ago
  They asked to add it to Git, however they are rejected.

dialamac 6y ago

I mean git is wildly popular because of GitHub, and probably that was something to do with it in the Rails community... a community that if anything is culturally the opposite of the kernel dev community (or at least very different). I don’t think any kernel dev influence had to do with it, even though it’s often stated as a fact.

pdw 6y ago
No, even at the time of GitHub's founding Git was already the clear winner. Think about it, why did GitHub feel safe launching with only Git support, while its competitors (Google Code, Bitbucket, SourceForge) had support for multiple VCSs?
- simonw 6y ago
  Disagree. Git wasn't the clear winner when GitHub launched - and in fact the entire category of distributed version control was still proving itself. I remember the GitHub team investing huge amounts of effort into convincing people to use git and teaching them how to do it - one of the four co-founders (Scott) was dedicated to that effort full-time.
  - Person5478 6y ago
    git was the clear winner when github released.
    - mikey_p 6y ago
      Not really, lots of folks were using mercurial with BitBucket which didn't support Git at the time. Bazaar and Launchpad were also pretty common. I remember at one point around 2009-2010 I was semi-regularly using CVS, Subversion, Mercurial, Bazaar and Git.
      - Person5478 6y ago
        lots of people were using lots of things at that time, most were using git.

acdha 6y ago

Kind of — I started using Mercurial before using Git and found a number of things which were easier or only possible using Git. Using some of the plugins for things like rebase were the only time I've ever lost data in a version control system. By the time they had addressed some of those gaps, almost all of the projects I used had moved to GitHub, which seemed to be far more of a driver than Linux.

eikenberry 6y ago

If I remember correctly Mercurial also made some dubious decisions early on (which they later reversed) that hurt adoption, like no in-repo branches and no ability to change history.

oblio 6y ago
> no ability to change history. This is a version control misfeature/bad practice. It's almost the single version control system that has it as part of its regular commands (though others allow it, generally as part of an admin set of permissions and usually with super clear warnings not to do it). And it's far from a reason why git won. Git won because it was written by Torvalds and every script kiddie dreams to be a Linux kernel hacker and because the Facebook for Code, Github, took off and it was based on git. Heck, I'd "accuse" you of rewriting history right now :-))
bsder 6y ago
Mercurial also made the really good decision to support Windows long before git was even functional there. I've got clients who have been using Mercurial on Windows for more than 10 years now. They email bundles to each other and have no problems, whatsoever, and don't even notice git. One quote: "Why would I want to go back to a central repository that I have to be connected to? That's stupid." Most Windows users, sadly, are simply too backward to use anything that isn't tightly integrated into the Microsoft ecosystem. So, it never really helped Mercurial that much. GitHub, however, was what drove git. Unfortunately, Github is to source control as PowerPoint is to presentations. It works--but it's a dumbed-down default and nobody thinks about the fact that there are sometimes much better alternatives for your use case.
- blt 6y ago
  Not sure I understand the analogy. What is PowerPoint a dumbed-down version of?
  - bsder 6y ago
    An actual textual report? Whiteboards? Overheads? Actual slides? Flip charts? Livecoding? Powerpoint is optimized for marketing and not much else. It exists because of two reasons: 1) Most people actively suck at presenting something. Forcing them to put their presentation in Powerpoint-standard forces some level of organization on them. 2) A lot of business presentation IS marketing--and Powerpoint is fine for that. The problem is that a lot of technical communication really doesn't fit into Powerpoint-standard (see: space-shuttle disasters for example). The problem is that now nobody knows how to do anything else and never even thinks about doing anything else.

johannes1234321 6y ago

Not only that, but GitHub came early and made the hosting easy. There was no similar offering for hg that early on.

qbasic_forever 6y ago
Github wasn't created until 2008, and in those early days there were big limits on hosting (very limited number of repos per user, even public ones). The everything free, everything easy all you can eat buffet that you see on Github today is a much more recent change. Back in '05 almost everything OSS was on source forge and Google Code, both of which offered super easy hosting, discussions, etc.
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  Sourceforge was already in demise, it was slow etc. when was it that they started adding malware? Don't remember ... i however remember Chris Wnastrath travelling to europe even for relatively small developer events and sponsoring the beer events. Quite a good marketing ...
tomjakubowski 6y ago
Circa 2011, Bitbucket was Hg-only and pretty comparable to GitHub in repository hosting features at the time. Took a bit to dig up with Google their 2011 announcement that they're now also supporting Git. https://bitbucket.org/blog/bitbucket-now-rocks-git https://bitbucket.org/blog/bitbucket-now-rocks-git

asiachick 6y ago

git won because it's default workflow is better than hg's hg added stuff to match git's workflow but it isn't hg's default. The tutorials for hg all teach a decidedly inferior workflow to git. ps: did a 20 person year long project in hg first, next project was git. Not going back if I can help it.