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It's refreshing to see someone with a level-headed response who doesn't fly off the rails defending their source control tool of choice, unlike what you usually

It's refreshing to see someone with a level-headed response who doesn't fly off the rails defending their source control tool of choice, unlike what you usually see with developers of well-known frameworks like PHP and Ruby. I don't personally use Mercurial myself, but it doesn't seem like a bad source control choice, anything is better than SVN, right? Git and Mercurial both seem like great and sensible choices.

nostrademons 13y ago
This type of response is quite common in many open-source communities. The trick to finding it is to consider carefully the motivations of why someone wants to participate in open-source. If you have a problem, you wrote a tool to solve it, and you want to share that tool with the rest of the world, you won't be threatened when someone else has a competing tool to share with the rest of the world. Just explain why your tool is useful, and under what circumstances, and let people make up their own minds. It's no skin off your back if they choose not to use it. If you participate in open-source to gain social approval and hacker cred, however, then it's very threatening when other people choose to use a competing tool. If your users disappear, so will your social approval, and you'll be left feeling alone and unwanted. And so people who are in open-source for this motivation frequently put-down technologies that that compete with their own favorite tools. Sometimes it's not even the tools' authors that do this; it is people who have adopted the tool and feel like their choice of preferred tool will be threatened if others adopt different tools. Hence, fanboyism. I have found, when evaluating technologies, that I rarely go wrong trying to select for the first category of community over the second. The problem is that there's a bit of an adverse selection effect. If you ask "What's the best framework for X?", then all the people in the second category will rush to defend their favorite tool, while the people in the first category may present cogent arguments for their tool of choice but won't seem all that impassioned. Human beings are hard-wired to recognize passion, but we typically cannot recognize experience until we have had that experience itself. And so your natural tendency will be to pick frameworks in the second category unless you specifically try to look past the arguments and look at the motivations and background of the people making the arguments.
TillE 13y ago
> anything is better than SVN, right? Hey, Subversion was the new hotness for quite a while. It fixed most of the hideous flaws of CVS and made version control actually usable. Any DVCS has a number of inherent advantages over SVN, but it does a good job for what it is.
fleitz 13y ago
Sadly no, not everything is better than SVN. SourceSafe, CVS immediately come to mind as systems worse than SVN.

nostrademons 13y ago

This type of response is quite common in many open-source communities. The trick to finding it is to consider carefully the motivations of why someone wants to participate in open-source. If you have a problem, you wrote a tool to solve it, and you want to share that tool with the rest of the world, you won't be threatened when someone else has a competing tool to share with the rest of the world. Just explain why your tool is useful, and under what circumstances, and let people make up their own minds. It's no skin off your back if they choose not to use it. If you participate in open-source to gain social approval and hacker cred, however, then it's very threatening when other people choose to use a competing tool. If your users disappear, so will your social approval, and you'll be left feeling alone and unwanted. And so people who are in open-source for this motivation frequently put-down technologies that that compete with their own favorite tools. Sometimes it's not even the tools' authors that do this; it is people who have adopted the tool and feel like their choice of preferred tool will be threatened if others adopt different tools. Hence, fanboyism. I have found, when evaluating technologies, that I rarely go wrong trying to select for the first category of community over the second. The problem is that there's a bit of an adverse selection effect. If you ask "What's the best framework for X?", then all the people in the second category will rush to defend their favorite tool, while the people in the first category may present cogent arguments for their tool of choice but won't seem all that impassioned. Human beings are hard-wired to recognize passion, but we typically cannot recognize experience until we have had that experience itself. And so your natural tendency will be to pick frameworks in the second category unless you specifically try to look past the arguments and look at the motivations and background of the people making the arguments.

TillE 13y ago

> anything is better than SVN, right? Hey, Subversion was the new hotness for quite a while. It fixed most of the hideous flaws of CVS and made version control actually usable. Any DVCS has a number of inherent advantages over SVN, but it does a good job for what it is.

fleitz 13y ago

Sadly no, not everything is better than SVN. SourceSafe, CVS immediately come to mind as systems worse than SVN.