5 ms·

Sigh... Tell me about it! This story and small variations on this story, I hear a lot from various sources! > We now use git for everything, because it seems

by Surio 14y ago

Sigh... Tell me about it! This story and small variations on this story, I hear a lot from various sources! > We now use git for everything, because it seems like it is the thing to do, You nailed it. And IMO this current obsession with Git/Github is bordering on unhealthy. I really wish/hope this fad dies out fast!

owenjones 14y ago
What about it is unhealthy and what about it is a fad? What do you wish/hope to replace Git with? Also anecdotal, but the graphic designers at our company have no problem using Git.
- TylerE 14y ago
  Mercurial? So much easier conceptually, the cmd line utility was written for actual humans, and it has sequential commit numbers.
  - ekimekim 14y ago
    Sequential commit numbers? How does that work with branching? Or other people's commits? eg. I commit #100, you commit #100, you pull my commit, now we have duplicate identifiers. Git commit ids are a hash of the commit content. This has very nice properties in that: - Ids are duplicate if and only if the commit is identical (the collision chance is so low it's not worth considering) - It's content-addressable And you can refer to it by any unique prefix, so it's not a pain to type out (and you should only rarely be typing out particular commits instead of branches or tags).
    - lucian1900 14y ago
      Mercurial has local sequential commit numbers. The hashes are of course what one must use when others are involved.
  - owenjones 14y ago
    Sure Mercurial is a valid and possibly better alternative, I'm just hesitant to call git's popularity an unhealthy fad.
  - jeffbradberry 14y ago
    I don't understand this obsession with sequential commit numbers. These may vary from repo to repo depending on your commit/pull history.
    - TylerE 14y ago
      Because bigger numbers mean later in time. If you see references to commits 143, 732, and 2021, you have some instant grasp on the ordering of those. acbe2f, 7624ab, bccc07 not so much.
      - jeffbradberry 14y ago
        A fair point, but in practice I get fellow engineers trying to quote the sequence numbers at me.
  - ef4 14y ago
    > it has sequential commit numbers That right there illustrates the disconnect that causes some people to dislike git while others love it. Git is truly distributed. In a distributed system, commits are not totally ordered. It is fundamentally impossible to give them all meaningful sequential numbers, because some are really neither newer nor older than others. They are "in parallel". Git excels at truly distributed workflows, and distributed workflows dominate in open source. That's why git dominates the open source world. The basic issue in open source is this: code is shared across organizational boundaries. You need to make and deploy a change today, without knowing or necessarily even caring whether the upstream project is going to take the patch. But your code needs to stay consistent and cleanly mergeable at every point through this process, even as multiple patches are flying in multiple directions.
  - jsight 14y ago
    Mercurial is really nice, IMO. I always preferred it over Git due to the well thought out CLI. Unfortunately, it's usage hasn't seemed to catch on outside of a few (Sun/Java). Git keeps getting better, and I'd be hesitant to put anything new on Mercurial at this point. The tooling just doesn't seem to be keeping up any more.
- silverbax88 14y ago
  Mercurial.
homosaur 14y ago
If people are using SCM for too many things instead of too few, then that's a major improvement. Git could be better, yes. I personally prefer Hg even though I almost never use it due to Git's ubiquity. But as far as switching to distributed SCM, we spent 2 or 3 years fighting to kill the crappy centralized SCM systems we were using and we'll go back to centralized over my dead body.. I'd rather deal with a less friendly distributed system than ever have to use SVN ever again and deal with all the merge nightmares.
robertfw 14y ago
While I'm not wild about all the eggs being in one basket, I find myself getting frustrated when code isn't on github, because I can't star/watch/track it from one central place. I use the star feature on github all the time to mark potentially useful/interesting libraries, and every now and then will browse through them to see which ones took off and which fizzled.

by Surio 14y ago

owenjones 14y ago

What about it is unhealthy and what about it is a fad? What do you wish/hope to replace Git with? Also anecdotal, but the graphic designers at our company have no problem using Git.

TylerE 14y ago
Mercurial? So much easier conceptually, the cmd line utility was written for actual humans, and it has sequential commit numbers.
- ekimekim 14y ago
  Sequential commit numbers? How does that work with branching? Or other people's commits? eg. I commit #100, you commit #100, you pull my commit, now we have duplicate identifiers. Git commit ids are a hash of the commit content. This has very nice properties in that: - Ids are duplicate if and only if the commit is identical (the collision chance is so low it's not worth considering) - It's content-addressable And you can refer to it by any unique prefix, so it's not a pain to type out (and you should only rarely be typing out particular commits instead of branches or tags).
  - lucian1900 14y ago
    Mercurial has local sequential commit numbers. The hashes are of course what one must use when others are involved.
- owenjones 14y ago
  Sure Mercurial is a valid and possibly better alternative, I'm just hesitant to call git's popularity an unhealthy fad.
- jeffbradberry 14y ago
  I don't understand this obsession with sequential commit numbers. These may vary from repo to repo depending on your commit/pull history.
  - TylerE 14y ago
    Because bigger numbers mean later in time. If you see references to commits 143, 732, and 2021, you have some instant grasp on the ordering of those. acbe2f, 7624ab, bccc07 not so much.
    - jeffbradberry 14y ago
      A fair point, but in practice I get fellow engineers trying to quote the sequence numbers at me.
- ef4 14y ago
  > it has sequential commit numbers That right there illustrates the disconnect that causes some people to dislike git while others love it. Git is truly distributed. In a distributed system, commits are not totally ordered. It is fundamentally impossible to give them all meaningful sequential numbers, because some are really neither newer nor older than others. They are "in parallel". Git excels at truly distributed workflows, and distributed workflows dominate in open source. That's why git dominates the open source world. The basic issue in open source is this: code is shared across organizational boundaries. You need to make and deploy a change today, without knowing or necessarily even caring whether the upstream project is going to take the patch. But your code needs to stay consistent and cleanly mergeable at every point through this process, even as multiple patches are flying in multiple directions.
- jsight 14y ago
  Mercurial is really nice, IMO. I always preferred it over Git due to the well thought out CLI. Unfortunately, it's usage hasn't seemed to catch on outside of a few (Sun/Java). Git keeps getting better, and I'd be hesitant to put anything new on Mercurial at this point. The tooling just doesn't seem to be keeping up any more.
silverbax88 14y ago
Mercurial.

homosaur 14y ago

If people are using SCM for too many things instead of too few, then that's a major improvement. Git could be better, yes. I personally prefer Hg even though I almost never use it due to Git's ubiquity. But as far as switching to distributed SCM, we spent 2 or 3 years fighting to kill the crappy centralized SCM systems we were using and we'll go back to centralized over my dead body.. I'd rather deal with a less friendly distributed system than ever have to use SVN ever again and deal with all the merge nightmares.

robertfw 14y ago

While I'm not wild about all the eggs being in one basket, I find myself getting frustrated when code isn't on github, because I can't star/watch/track it from one central place. I use the star feature on github all the time to mark potentially useful/interesting libraries, and every now and then will browse through them to see which ones took off and which fizzled.