7 ms·

GitHub won because Git won. It was obvious by the late 00s that some DVCS was going to upend subversion (and more niche VCS like TFS). It ended up a two horse r

• nine_k 2y ago
  Not just that. They invented "pull requests" and offered (initially minimal) code review tools. This made contributing in the open.much easier, and making small contributions, vastly easier. Something like git had to take over svn / cvs / rcs. It could be Perforce, it could be BitKeeper which apparently pioneered the approach. But it had to be open-source, or at least free. Git won not just because it was technically superior; it also won because it was at the same time free software.
  • fweimer 2y ago
    Pull requests predate Git. The kernel developers used them in the Bitkeeper days: I exported this a patch and then imported onto a clone of Marcelo's tree, so it appears as a single cset where the changes that got un-done never happened. I've done some sanity tests on it, and will test it some more tomorrow. Take a look at it and let me know if I missed anything. When Andy is happy with it I'll leave it to him to re-issue a pull request from Marcelo. https://lore.kernel.org/linux-acpi/BF1FE1855350A0479097B3A0D2A80EE009FC7F@hdsmsx402.hd.intel.com/ https://lore.kernel.org/linux-acpi/BF1FE1855350A0479097B3A0D... I do not know to what extent Bitkeeper had browser-based workflows. Moving cross-repository merges away from the command line may actually have been innovative, but of course of little interest to kernel developers.
    • schacon 2y ago
      That's interesting. I know BK had "pulls", but iirc it didn't have a "request-pull" command, so clearly the "pull" terminology came from BK and the "request" part came from how people talked about it in email. I actually just shot a video showing how BitKeeper was used. I'll post that and a blog post on our GitButler blog soon.
    • bluGill 2y ago
      Mercurial also supported pull requests. The unique thing about github was an easy central place to do them from and ensuring they didn't get lost. Once you have a github account you can fork a project make a change and pull request it in a few minutes. emailing a patch isn't hard, but with github you don't have to look up what address to email it to, if you just say open pull requests it typically goes to the right place the first time.
  • irunmyownemail 2y ago
    I remember we used a tool, I think it was Gerrit, before I'd heard of GitHub or Pull Requests. It worked with patches which is also how we used to share code, through email with patches. GitHub won because it had a cleaner UI and a likable name.
    • dijit 2y ago
      I found Gerrit recently. I love it so much, I hate how the other code review systems kinda suck in comparison but people prefer them. I guess it's proof that features and shiny are more important than a good idea.
• dboreham 2y ago
  Yes, article seems to miss this. I believe (at the time, and still) that git won because the cost to host the server side of it is orders of magnitude lower than the competitors (svn, perforce, etc). All those other revision control systems ended up with a big server cost that couldn't justify a free hosting service. Plus git provided a reasonable (but still not great) solution to "decentralized development", which none of the others attempted to do.
  • schacon 2y ago
    I'm curious how you come to this conclusion. GitHub has always had fairly insane hosting problem sets. When someone clones the Linux repo, that's like 5G in one go. The full clone issues and the problems of a few edge case repos create sometimes crazy hosting costs and scaling problems. Most centralized systems only have to deal with one working tree or one delta at a time. There is not much that goes over the wire in centralized systems in general, comparatively.
  • bluGill 2y ago
    Why didn't mercurial win then? There were almost a dozen other distributed version control systems built in those early days, most of which I cannot remember but all had the same distributed ideas behind them and should be been as easy to host (some easier).
    • troutwine 2y ago
      At my university, performance. The CS department was clued into Linux development but also the Haskell world so darcs use among students was high. Our underpowered lab machines and personal devices struggled with darcs for reasons I no longer remembered and a group of us made use of mercurial for an OS project and had a rough go of it as the patch sets got more and more convoluted. Back in those days the core was C but a lot of the logic was Python which struggled on the memory constrained devices available. Some one of us learned about git trying to get into Linux kernel work, told the rest of us and it was just comically fast, is my memory. I spent a tedious weekend converting all my projects to git and never looked back, myself. Some years later Facebook did a lot of work to improve the speed of mercurial but the ship had sailed. Interesting idea though.
• BeetleB 2y ago
  > GitHub won because Git won. Sorry, but Git won because Github won. Lots of people loved (and still use) Mercurial. It lacked the network effect because Github didn't support it. > GitHub bet on Git. Bitbucket bet on Mercurial. Bitbucket didn't lose because of Mercurial. They lost because Github had a better product (in terms of sharing code, etc). It also was neglected by Atlassian in 2010. > It seems strange now but there was a period of time during the late 00s and early 10s when developers were pretty passionate about their choice of DVCS. Sorry buddy, but there are still plenty of us Mercurial users. Maybe, just maybe, even dozens! (Seriously, I use Mercurial for all my projects).
  • bornfreddy 2y ago
    As someone who used both git and hg, I must say I'm sorry git won. Its chrome sucks (though less than it did) and the naming is confusing as hell. Still, if everyone uses git, and you have to use BitBucket for hosting instead of GitHub/Lab... Nah, not worth it. Kudos to you for sticking with it!
    • BeetleB 2y ago
      > Still, if everyone uses git, and you have to use BitBucket for hosting instead of GitHub/Lab Isn't this supporting my point? That a barrier to use mercurial was that people preferred Github over Bitbucket? > Kudos to you for sticking with it! It's simple a lot easier to use it vs Git! Kudos to whoever suffers through the latter!
    • Izkata 2y ago
      As someone who tried out both git and hg around 2012 with only svn experience, I found hg confusing and git easy to understand. Unfortunately it's been so long since then I don't remember exactly what it was that confused me. Something around how they handle branches.
      • nottorp 2y ago
        I've only recently started to use mercurial in earnest for one project (legacy reasons). It's branches for me too. At least considering my experience with it is limited. I don't like how every time you pull someone else's changes you end by default in a state that is probably similar with git's detached head. With git, most of the time you are on a named branch, you know where you are and you pull/push stuff out of said named branch. With mercurial some of the branches are unnamed and it's still confusing why I'd want that. Perhaps the original designers didn't like having private local-only named branches, I don't know. This may just be an artefact of my very limited experience with hg though.
• bsder 2y ago
  > Git took the early lead and never looked back. And GitHub's competitors were too slow to embrace Git. So GitHub dominated developer mindshare. And Mercurial spent an enormous amount of effort going after Windows users and basically got absolutely nothing for it. In my opinion, this was what really hurt Mercurial. Nobody in Windows-land was going to use anything other than the official Microsoft garbage. Consequently, every ounce of effort spent on Windows was effort completely wasted that could have been spent competing with Git/Github.
• globular-toast 2y ago
  Git also massively benefitted from GitHub. Do you know a single person who even knows you can use git without a "forge" like GitHub, let alone knows how to or actually does it? It's hard to remember but there was a time when git was resisted. When I first started to use it, a lot of people were saying you don't need it, you only want to use it because it's hipster and the kernel uses it, but you're not the kernel etc. It's exactly the same as k8s is all these years later (the tide seems finally turning on k8s, though). Without GitHub (or something else), git would have remained a weird kernel thing. But, equally, without git GitHub would have had no raison d'être. It's a symbiotic relationship. GitHub completely the picture and together they won.
  • ajford 2y ago
    I taught my research group Git version control in college. It was part of a "new student/researcher onboarding" series that we put all the new grad students and undergrads through. But we were in Radio Astronomy, so there was a lot of data processing and modeling stuff that required being comfortable within a remote ssh session and the basics of Linux/bash/python. I know it was already being used in Radio Astronomy (at least in the sub-field of Pulsar Astronomy) at the time and was part of the reason I didn't get pushback when I proposed making sure our group was trained up on using it. We switched to Git as a whole in early 2009 since it was already a better experience than SVN at the time. Could be off by a year or two, given how long ago this was and the fact that I was working with the group through the end of high school in 2007-2008. We only added GitHub to our training later in 2011-2013 era, but we ran our own bare git repos on our department servers until then. And students/groups were responsible for setting up their own repos for their research projects (with assistance/guidance to ensure security on the server). Last job also made use of our own internal bare repos, admittedly mirrors of our private GH projects, and our stack pulled from that mirror to ensure we always had an instance that was not dependent on an external vendor. Current role also makes use of bare git repos for similar reasons. I think the knowledge is there and plenty people do it, it's just not news/blog worthy anymore. It's not new or groundbreaking so it gets little attention.
• beAbU 2y ago
  Is Git and GitHub a DVCS though? Have you ever checked out code directly from a colleague's machine? GitHub is very central-looking from where I'm standing, and the differences between Git and SVN are very academic and does not really apply in practice any more. GitHub allowing forks of repo's to request PRs between one another is probably the only DVCS thing about all this. But this model does not apply to orgs hosting their proprietary code on GH, where the developers don't have their own forks of their employer's code repos. I'm pretty sure it would have been possible to replicate pull requests with SVN on GitHub in some alternative reality.
  • infecto 2y ago
    Git is a DVCS though. Just because GitHub exists does not exclude Git from the category of a DVCS. You get a local copy of the entire history with Git which is what pushes it into that category, nothing to do with GitHub. SVN is centralized in the sense that you are not grabbing the entire copy of the repo locally. Not academic differences.
    • beAbU 2y ago
      It's been a hot minute since I've used SVN at work, but in my last job where it was SVN, each dev checked out the entire repository locally. Even though you /could/ check out a section of the repo, it made no sense to do that, because you need the entire codebase to run locally. Branching was still a mess though, and Git has really innovated in this space. We used to all dev on `develop` branch, and we'd daily pull from the server, fix merge conflicts locally, and then push up to the server. On releases our lead dev would merge dev with master and run off a build. I still maintain the differences are academic, because even though Git is a DVCS (and I agree it is), and it is possible to use it as a DVCS. But given that GitHub is the defacto standard, and everyone uses it for work and OSS, I posit we are actually using Git as a CVCS, and any argument about Git being better than SVN because it's a DCVS is moot because nobody is using Git's distributed features anyway.
      • infecto 2y ago
        I think we are missing something here, would like to be corrected if wrong. Git is a DVCS because when you clone/pull a repo it includes the entire working history of the repo. Thats why its distributed, you could pull a repo from somewhere and never need to touch that source again. Has very little to do with Github. SVN which I have not used in recent history but historically your local copy does not include the full change history of that repo and relied on a SVN server for that information. I actually don't quite follow your arguments because while yes, we tend to setup Git so that is "centralized" the distinction is not about Github but that your local working copy is everything.