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Why did Git become so popular?

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Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#81

Post by ajross »

papsosouid wrote: post #59
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…

>Using it in your own ivory tower isn't going to impress anyone for the simple reason that no one sees it Using loaded terms to put down people who use the tool they prefer isn't going to convince anyone that your argument has merit.

Making style points about bland, cliched[1] metaphors adds even less to the discussion. Seriously? "Ivory Tower" (!) is a forbidden term that should be banned from civil discourse?

[1] Now that you've drawn attention to it, I do indeed wish I'd phrased that differently. But certainly not because I hurt someone's feelings...

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#82

Post by freework »

wiremine wrote: post #67

I remember attending an OSCON session on git vs. Subversion back in 2006 or 2007. The presenter's thesis was basically that git was more efficient than subversion when it came to branching. Near the end he walked through the distributed nature of git. That was the second of third OSCON I attended, and I have never seen, nor have I seen since, that many utterly confused developers in a single room. At the time I thoug…

Hopefully, test driven development will be one of them. I don't know what will replace it, but some day we'll look back and say "I can'r believe we used to spend so much time writing so many tests"

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#83

Post by jiggy2011 »

ajross wrote: post #80
samspot wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to know your grounds for saying svn was "forgotten". Forgotten by who?

Subversion is used by very few remaining public projects, almost entirely for legacy reasons. Almost literally zero "recent" projects are using it at all. It has no more mind share than does CVS at this point, and "no one" uses CVS (again, except for a few legacy spots). I really didn't think that was controversial. Subversion was indeed a much better CVS than CVS. And the world almost jumped on it as a standard. But…

I'm willing to bet there's plenty of small PHP shops out there still using SVN.

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#84

Post by alwillis »

Niten wrote: post #75
npsimons wrote: post #53

I think the question betrays the authors bias and assumes too much; by claiming that "almost every article comparing mercurial and git" and saying "it seems like Mercurial has a better command line UX", the author is obviously a fan of Mercurial; neither of those points seem to be true. While I can understand the sour grapes at seeing an "inferior" technology win, it's not that clear cut. I haven't used Mercurial eno…

I use both extensively (git for most personal projects, Mercurial at work), so I feel like chiming in here. I really do think that Mercurial's user interface is easier for beginners to pick up, and more difficult to shoot oneself in the foot with. It's the little things, like the fact that Mercurial's push and pull commands do exactly the opposite of one another, that hg clone/pull URLs are identical to what you type…

From what I can see, Mercurial actually has more flexibility when it comes to branching: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-me...

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#85

Post by anonymous »

micampe wrote: post #77
anonymous wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Subversion is really simple too: it only has files and directories, branches are directories, tags are directories. I don’t think stupid and simple worked very well in that case. Arguments can be made for both sides, picking a single design decision and saying that that’s obviously better is not going to work. Implementation and (especially in a case like distributed systems) network effects are much stronger than an…

Sure, I was talking about my situation.

And of course, if mercurial could give me more features, I'd probably think twice. However, it's practically equivalent to git.

I was comparing git and mercurial, not giving the one true testament to comparison of every possible version control system.

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#86

Post by solutionyogi »

anonymous wrote: post #46
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…

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.

Exactly. Stupid is better. Stupid doesn't break. I like stupid things which I understand in and out. Yes, git command line is not the best but because I understand the data format so well, you can easily use different approaches to solve a given problem.

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#87

Post by Niten »

alwillis wrote: post #84
Niten wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use both extensively (git for most personal projects, Mercurial at work), so I feel like chiming in here. I really do think that Mercurial's user interface is easier for beginners to pick up, and more difficult to shoot oneself in the foot with. It's the little things, like the fact that Mercurial's push and pull commands do exactly the opposite of one another, that hg clone/pull URLs are identical to what you type…

From what I can see, Mercurial actually has more flexibility when it comes to branching: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-me...

More options, certainly, but I find git to be much more painless in this regard. Mercurial doesn't have anything equivalent to git's convenient workflow for creating temporary, local throwaway branches, without changing to a new working directory.

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#88

Post by npsimons »

Niten wrote: post #75
npsimons wrote: post #53

I think the question betrays the authors bias and assumes too much; by claiming that "almost every article comparing mercurial and git" and saying "it seems like Mercurial has a better command line UX", the author is obviously a fan of Mercurial; neither of those points seem to be true. While I can understand the sour grapes at seeing an "inferior" technology win, it's not that clear cut. I haven't used Mercurial eno…

I use both extensively (git for most personal projects, Mercurial at work), so I feel like chiming in here. I really do think that Mercurial's user interface is easier for beginners to pick up, and more difficult to shoot oneself in the foot with. It's the little things, like the fact that Mercurial's push and pull commands do exactly the opposite of one another, that hg clone/pull URLs are identical to what you type…

but only if you aren't working primarily on Windows

Again, I'll admit I'm biased (I'm mostly a Linux guy), but for the day job, they are currently paying me to develop stuff for Windows, and both myself (via Cygwin), and my current coding partner (via MSysGit) have no issues whatsoever with Git in Windows. A previous team member also quickly adapted to Git via TortoiseGit.

The flexibility of being able to rewrite history, the staging area, stashes and branching quickly are just too powerful, and being both code monkeys and CLI junkies, we don't miss the "integration" much (albeit, I love EGG: https://github.com/byplayer/egg).

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#89

Post by solutionyogi »

garenp wrote: post #72
jlgreco wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Popularity itself is an often overlooked feature. When trying to sell the use of a version control system to others (peers, coworkers, bosses, etc. Or more difficult if you are trying to make an institutional change) you are already in a better position with git than you are with mercurial. If all mercurial is bringing to the table is being a bit more pleasant, I am still going to pass over it for that reason.

I can sympathize with the difficulty of persuading others. But consider this not-so-far-fetched example: if you're choosing an open-source database, you would choose MySQL based on popularity instead of PostgreSQL, which I would argue in most cases is a mistake--which you'll likely have to live with for years.

That's not a fair comparison. Mercurial is better than git in certain aspects (mainly command line experience) but git by itself is a solid content tracker. It has an extremely simple data model and it's rock solid. As someone else said in this thread, git has no separate notion of 'branch', 'tag' like Mercurial. In a way, git is actually like PostgreSQL, a solid piece of software which you can trust.

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#90

Post by npsimons »

freework wrote: post #82
wiremine wrote: post #67

I remember attending an OSCON session on git vs. Subversion back in 2006 or 2007. The presenter's thesis was basically that git was more efficient than subversion when it came to branching. Near the end he walked through the distributed nature of git. That was the second of third OSCON I attended, and I have never seen, nor have I seen since, that many utterly confused developers in a single room. At the time I thoug…

Hopefully, test driven development will be one of them. I don't know what will replace it, but some day we'll look back and say "I can'r believe we used to spend so much time writing so many tests"

If you don't test it, how do you know it works?
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