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Why did Git become so popular?

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Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#111

Post by Niten »

alwillis wrote: post #100
Niten wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But like I explained in detail above, using Mercurial bookmarks it is tedious to avoid pushing your throw-away branch to the main repository, and you can't simply delete the branch when you're done with it. Git is much superior in this regard.

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#113

Post by papsosouid »

ajross wrote: post #81
papsosouid wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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...

Who said it was forbidden? Or that you hurt anyone's feelings? Your argument is less effective due to the words you used. That is what I said.

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#114

Post by _ikke_ »

pdw wrote: post #99
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.

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?

My first encounter with git was in about 2009 on windows, and I don't recall it being unusable.

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#115

Post by stouset »

PuercoPop wrote: post #94
jiggy2011 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Patently and laughably false.

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#116

Post by Aga »

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…

Albert Einstein is attributed with a great quote: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

I would argue that in the case of Git it's not about a single design decision. The whole design is very simple and easily understandable. Thus everything can be derived from the design decisions.

The design decisions also have clear rationales.

"Why something is better" and "why something has "won"" are of course different questions that deserve different answers.

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#117

Post by micampe »

Aga wrote: post #116
micampe wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Albert Einstein is attributed with a great quote: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” I would argue that in the case of Git it's not about a single design decision. The whole design is very simple and easily understandable. Thus everything can be derived from the design decisions. The design decisions also have clear rationales. "Why something is better" and "why something has "won"" ar…

Having taught Git to a number of people, I disagree that it’s easily understandable. It’s easy to understand the general idea of how it works, but actually productively using it is an entirely different matter.

Of course, I may also be a terrible teacher.

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#118

Post by enobrev »

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.

As a single data point, I chose git due to github around late 2010 and consequently moved a couple of my clients (and current employer) over to git/hub.

I personally still prefer bzr's cli.

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#119

Post by secure »

pseut wrote: post #33
secure wrote: post #11

cross-posting my answer here: The package "gnuit" (GNU Interactive Tools, a file browser/viewer and process viewer) was called "git" in Debian up until 2009-09-09, while git was called "git-core". Therefore, a better graph to look at is: http://qa.debian.org/popcon-png.php?packages=git-core%20git&... Which shows that the popularity did not rise dramatically (take the green line for the left part until they cross, the…

> Which shows that the popularity did not rise dramatically (take the green line for the left part until they cross, then take the red line). It's less dramatic, but it does look like there's a pretty substantial increase that can probably be attributed to "using an easier to discover package name." Out of (genuine) curiosity, does the graph include Ubuntu users?

The graph does not contain Ubuntu users. Ubuntu also uses popularity contest, but with a separate database from Debian.

The number of popcon submissions in Ubuntu is one order of magnitude higher than the number of popcon submissions in Debian.

Unfortunately, I cannot find out whether Ubuntu makes the graphs publically accessible like Debian does.

Re: Why did Git become so popular?

#120

Post by Aga »

micampe wrote: post #117
Aga wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Albert Einstein is attributed with a great quote: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” I would argue that in the case of Git it's not about a single design decision. The whole design is very simple and easily understandable. Thus everything can be derived from the design decisions. The design decisions also have clear rationales. "Why something is better" and "why something has "won"" ar…

Having taught Git to a number of people, I disagree that it’s easily understandable. It’s easy to understand the general idea of how it works, but actually productively using it is an entirely different matter. Of course, I may also be a terrible teacher.

I too have been teaching Git for many years now.

I find it easy to teach, thanks the concepts being simple and clear. I don't have to transfer a lot of information before people can start reasoning about things themselves and independently finding out more.

I always try to make sure people understand two things:

1) The history tree (==how to read the metro-map that is gitk)

2) Distribution, that you are responsible for syncing with others, not the other way round

Almost everything else I prefer the students at least try to figure out themselves.

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