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Actually I think Github got popular because it was Git, not the other way around. At the time it appeared people just wanted to have git repos, Github was there
by eloisant 13y ago
Actually I think Github got popular because it was Git, not the other way around. At the time it appeared people just wanted to have git repos, Github was there, so they used it.
- rbanffy 13y agoConfirming that, Bitbucket added git support because they saw Mercurial as not competitive with Git.
- agwa 13y agoBut only after Git became wildly popular because of GitHub.
- agwa 13y agoThere wasn't a demand for Git repos any more than there was a demand for Hg repos. For instance, open source projects moving away from SVN seemed to be pretty evenly distributed between Git and Hg. The real demand was for a way to publish code and collaborate, and GitHub provided a truly innovative approach (the social aspects, encouraging forking and pull requests) that was miles better than the alternatives (SourceForge was already in decline, Google Code didn't have the social/forking/pull request aspects). I think they would have been successful with any distributed VCS. I always preferred Git, so I'm happy they chose Git, but I think that if they had chosen Hg, we'd be talking about how Hg won the popularity war instead of Git.