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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 hav

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.

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.