6 ms·

It misses out BitKeeper, which inspired both Git and Mercurial, which was launched 5 years earlier.

• tonfa 15y ago
  Monotone gave most inspiration according to the authors of git and hg. But the author addresses the point anyway: > I’m not recording the first time anyone made the astonishing thing, but the first time it was productised and became popular.
  • ajross 15y ago
    Torvalds was expressly trying to replace bitkeeper when he wrote git. And I'm not sure anything he said about other systems might be considered "inspiration". But that said, git really isn't very similar to bitkeeper except insofar as it enables distributed development. Both model development as a forest of independent developer trees which communicate with each other through merges. But bitkeeper is still a traditional centralized server keeping a bunch of delta'd files.
    • tedunangst 15y ago
      bitkeeper only has a central server to the same extent that git does. Somebody on the team picks a repo and says "this one is for serious" and that's it. The decision bitkeeper made to keep files in SCCS format was of course not revolutionary, but tells you quite a bit about the target market (people who had makefiles that relied on implicit commands like get just working). They went to extra effort to make it look just a bunch of delta'd files.
    • andrewflnr 15y ago
      According to Wikipedia[1], he liked some of its features, and seemed to float it as a model for a replacement. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotone_(software)#Monotone_as_Git_inspiration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotone_(software)#Monotone_as...
• rst 15y ago
  It gives very short shrift to commercial source control systems generally. Two (VSS, and SCCS --- the latter part of the original AT&T Unix distributions, on the same closed-source terms) get mentioned in passing, but neither gets treated as a milestone. That would include BitKeeper --- copies were available for a few years at no cost to Linux kernel developers, but only on increasingly restrictive terms, which McVoy ultimately wound up revoking altogether. IIRC, Linus released the first embryonic version of git within weeks after McVoy withdrew the free-as-in-beer version of BitKeeper.
  • Create 15y ago
    Misses also GOOG's dearly Perforce.
    • tedunangst 15y ago
      There is nothing particularly astonishing about perforce. What makes you think it should have been included?
      • to3m 15y ago
        If you ignore all the distributed "stuff", and the workflow enhancements it permits, and assume everybody is always connected to the server and attached via a LAN, you can just concentrate on doing a reasonably good job of handling very large quantities of data, including very large binary files. (Apologies for not trying to reproduce the breathless style of headline.) As is common, the article presupposes that decentralization is unambiguously progress, but that isn't true in all respects. People often complain about the idea of using version control for large binary files, as if it is unreasonable to want such a thing, and that as a point of principle version control systems should contain only text files, and the fact that many version control systems support this poorly is proof that you don't want it anyway. But there are actually people who create, with their own hands, large binary files, often of the completely-unmergeable variety, and they deserve version control just as much as the programmers do. (And then once you have a system that works well for them, you can then use it to solve all manner of problems that might previously have involved storing files in public folders, mailing them round, or maybe just waiting for them to compile again. No need for any of that crap any more - just check the files in, they're there forever, and you can get them back quickly.)
• piotrSikora 15y ago
  It also misses NSElite (later Teamware), which, in Larry McVoy's words, was BitKeeper's grandparent.