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Why did Git become so popular?

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Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#41

Post by krmmalik »

pooriaazimi wrote: post #10
silverbax88 wrote: post #6

Having used ClearCase, CVS, Subversion, TFS, Git and Mercurial, I would have to say it's because not enough people have tried Mercurial. I have no interest in Git, but I think people like GitHub (or maybe don't know about BitBucket)

To be fair, BitBucket was way uglier than GitHub until very recently (latest redesign). That's a turn-off for most people (unfortunately). The new BitBucket is awesome, though.

Clean design inspires confidence. I looked at BitBucket about 2 years ago, and just didn't have enough confidence in it, but recently created quite a few repo's on it and am using them everyday. The new re-design makes all the difference in gaining my trust.

At least that's how I see it.

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#42

Post by dexen »

[deleted] wrote: post #22
ajross wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This contains the answer for why git won: Mercurial people have "no interest" in it. What that tells me is that you have no interest in working with the community and contributing to other peoples' projects, most of which use git these days. Sure, if you want a SCM for your own team or your own private use, you can make a strong case for hg being "better". But that's not what SCM is for. Using it in your own ivory to…

[deleted]

> It's git that is unfriendly to others...

I have some code in Git with my custom patches, with upstream being Hg. `git-hg' works like a charm -- simple, clean etc. etc.. Dunno what you are talking about here.

Git provides git-fast-export & git-fast-import as two-way interconnects, with well-defined data formats.

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#43

Post by jlgreco »

[deleted] wrote: post #22
ajross wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This contains the answer for why git won: Mercurial people have "no interest" in it. What that tells me is that you have no interest in working with the community and contributing to other peoples' projects, most of which use git these days. Sure, if you want a SCM for your own team or your own private use, you can make a strong case for hg being "better". But that's not what SCM is for. Using it in your own ivory to…

[deleted]

1) Tools to do that certainly exist. Nobody really cares about them to make them nicer.

2) Git is trivial to extend. If something for git doesn't exist that does not suggest any sort of arrogant attitude from git, but rather just a total lack of interest from both the developers and the community.

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#44

Post by raverbashing »

igrekel wrote: post #29
Tloewald wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We assume ClearCase is the worst, right?

Assuming too much... People who conplain loudly about ClearCase most often never understood how it is supposed to work. Ok ok, you need an army of administrators to make it work but still far from being the worst. Sourcesafe?

"most often never understood how it is supposed to work"

This is a BS argument.

Yes, everybody got it wrong, Git is wrong, SVN is wrong, it's CCs broken model that's correct.

" you need an army of administrators to make it work"

Yes, let's sink an awful amount of money in a half-baked software that needs all kinds of 'helpers' to work properly.

Personally I won't work in a company that uses CC anymore, and it's been only bliss since then.

Sourcesafe is bad, but it's a different kind of bad. And it makes even CC look good.

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#45

Post by ewood »

I worked at a company where we migrated from CVS to Mercurial in 2009 and then to Git a year later. I would say that the general move to distributed source control away from CVS/SVN style centralised systems picked up steam from 09 onwards, and for us Mercurial won over Git initially because it had better Windows support. While I loved Mercurial's more simple command syntax, moving to Git was a no-brainer after we'd been bitten by Mercurial's poor handling of large binary files and Msysgit had improved the Windows support situation. This blog post (http://blog.extracheese.org/2010/05/why-i-switched-to-git-fr...) from 2010 would seem to suggest that others had a similar experience.

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#46

Post by anonymous »

ajross wrote: post #14
silverbax88 wrote: post #6

Having used ClearCase, CVS, Subversion, TFS, Git and Mercurial, I would have to say it's because not enough people have tried Mercurial. I have no interest in Git, but I think people like GitHub (or maybe don't know about BitBucket)

This contains the answer for why git won: Mercurial people have "no interest" in it. What that tells me is that you have no interest in working with the community and contributing to other peoples' projects, most of which use git these days. Sure, if you want a SCM for your own team or your own private use, you can make a strong case for hg being "better". But that's not what SCM is for. Using it in your own ivory to…

I looked at mercurial once. I didn't start using it, because it has a more complicated vocabulary than git.

Git just has a directed acyclic graph and pointers to the nodes of it. That's all. End of story.

Mercurial has the concept of a branch, a tag and so on as seemingly separate axiomatic things. It's not as stupid.

I like stupid.

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#47

Post by jlgreco »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #30

I wonder how much of the time git is in practice used identically to SVN?

Even used like that, there are clear advantages to using git to preform that model rather than SVN. To really get the proper "just like SVN" experience you would have to find a way to make git suck at branches and merging, at the least.

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#48

Post by garenp »

ashishgandhi wrote: post #5
fbuilesv wrote: post #2

I think the current answer fails to mention two important things: 1. GitHub. 2. Linus himself wrote it (the kernel previously used BitKeeper but that never got any real traction AFAIK). Having said that, I think this phrase totally nails it: "If it's good enough for the Linux kernel, it's good enough for you" is a very convincing argument.

GitHub was founded in 2008. The spike is in 2010-01. That's what the question mentions too.

Before that time, git lacked http support, which means a large population behind firewalls couldn't use it. From memory, that happened sometime in December 2009, which correlates very closely with that graph.
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