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)
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Why did Git become so popular?
91–100 of 122 posts
Re: Why did Git become so popular?
#92Having 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.
Agreed! BitBucket's [http://bitbucket.org/] new UI rocks!
Re: Why did Git become so popular?
#93Having 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)
> I would have to say it's because not enough people have > tried Mercurial Or maybe enough of them tried Mercurial. I know I did, then switched to git and did not look back since.
I switched to hg, found it very much the same as git, no appreciable difference to warrant moving again.
code control is a solved problem and people have moved on to do other things...
Re: Why did Git become so popular?
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, before git took over there was CVS (and a brief moment when svn looked like it might win, before being forgotten). There still are "all kinds of VCS including a bunch of proprietary stuff". But as before with CVS (and RCS before it) the open source community has picked an overwhelming favorite. And I'm not saying you should choose git because it's better. I'm saying git "won" in the community because it was the c…
Well I remember MS Sourcesafe being popular a few years ago. Do hg people "share less" or are there simply less of them? IIRC github allows commits from hg as well as git. And of course not everyone (in fact possibly only the minority) is interested in cloning and issuing pull requests on OSS a huge amount of programming happens internally in corporations where everyone will use whichever VCS is mandated.
it is bitbucket the one that allows both hg and git. Github only allows git
Re: Why did Git become so popular?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
You said you haven't used Mercurial much to really compare, and then you compared, and said git is more flexible, and the CLI difference are negligible. So I think you definitely have a bias towards git. I use Mercurial and Git every day, and I can tell you there's a marked difference between the usability of Mercurial and Git. Git would become totally unusable if it weren't for stackoverflow and google, while I can…
I admit I'm biased towards git; but, unlike the original question poster, I can link to articles backing up my assessment that the UX differences between Git and Mercurial are negligible at best, and most likely any perceived differences are highly subjective.
Actually, the UX differences aren't negligible; from Google's assessment of Mercurial and Git. Complexity has a cost in terms of time, mistakes made, training, that can be quantified. From Google's assessment of Mercurial and Git: http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/DVCSAnalysis
Learning Curve. Git has a steeper learning curve than Mercurial due to a number of factors. Git has more commands and options, the volume of which can be intimidating to new users. Mercurial's documentation tends to be more complete and easier for novices to read. Mercurial's terminology and commands are also a closer to Subversion and CVS, making it familiar to people migrating from those systems.
Re: Why did Git become so popular?
#96Having 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.
I agree with you. Even though BitBucket allowed private repositories for free, their poor usability and interface kept users away. GitHub is not just Git. GitHub would have become popular due to its ease of use and cool user interface even if it was based on Mercurial (hg) or, may be, even Darcs. Bitbucket's latest design is good but has arrived later than expected.
Re: Why did Git become so popular?
#97Popularity begets popularity. I evaluated a ClearCase replacement in early 2012 for a large company, and Git is clearly the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" SCM.
I looked at hg. It is easier, especially for the windows users. However, git was already coming from a few different directions and hg's simplicity was not enough to tip the scale.
We are now mid-migration. If git devs are listening - this is my biggest nit:
$ apropos git | grep ^git | wc -l 159
I do believe an alternative "porcelain" will eventually supplant the core git commands, making it more user friendly.
Re: Why did Git become so popular?
#98Earlier 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 think we're at odds because I'm thinking of developers in general and you are focused on open source work. I don't have stats, but I'd be willing to bet that a majority of code being written is closed source even today. I think this is worth remembering in any discussion about source control.
Re: Why did Git become so popular?
#99I 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.
I wonder how big a factor Windows is. I remember that in 200x several projects (e.g. Mozilla and Java) chose Mercurial over Git because of Git's poor Windows support. At which point did Git become usable on Windows?
Re: Why did Git become so popular?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You mean like Mercurial bookmarks?
Branching with bookmarks is very close to the way git usually handles branching. Mercurial bookmarks are like git refs: named pointers to changesets that move on commit.