191–200 of 317 posts
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Apple still insists on building their kernel atop Mach, and it doesn't seem to stop their momentum. (Even though it's kind of a strange choice.)
It is odd, I predicted about 5 years back that Apple would gradually converge the API to FreeBSD and then switch. They would still be better off doing that I think, but they show no signs of doing this.
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Well, there's also the "social and signaling effects" of using something that's non-git The "not a field" of Computer Programming, to appropriate Alan Kay's quip, is so broken that "social and signaling effects" swamp actual facts and information to a degree that makes it look like Astrology. I've been watching this for decades now -- literally. Dynamic languages were for years after still tarred with being "slow" wh…
What are the actual facts in this case? There are tons of people who use and know git. It's fast, it works pretty well. There's some value in the fact that it's widely known and used (network effects), probably enough that whatever takes its place will probably be not just a bit better, but a lot better, in some way. bzr does not strike me, offhand, as being a lot better. Is fossil? So in this case, I think that the…
I'm talking in general. I think it's good they're going to git.
bzr does not strike me, offhand, as being a lot better.
I never said it was better or worse. My comment is about the "field" and how accurate its "information" is in general. Sometimes social signalling and network effects are good. What disturbs me is that so many of us use this as a substitute for facts and objective analysis.
Taking social signalling and network effects into account is okay. Only going that far and stopping is just dim laziness. (It's also behind the worst examples of sexism and ageism in our "field.")
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Adding a bit of history to the other comments: Bazaar is actually a successor to an earlier DVCS, called Gnu Arch (or Tom Lord's Arch, TLA, at some point). It started out in 2001 and was, I believe, the first of the DVCS crowd. It had some idiosyncrasies, but was a huge step up from CVS in terms of its principles. tla was forked into baz (previously Bazaar), and bzr (previously Bazaar-NG) was a rewrite taking into ac…
Here [1] is a good but necessarily incomplete summary of version control tool history, written by ESR. Tom Lord does deserve much credit for DVCS concepts, but so do Larry McVoy (Bitkeeper) and Graydon Hoare (Monotone). [1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/version-control/version-con...
Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6999094
Curiously, the URL seems exactly identical in both submissions, which are almost consecutive ( ...94, ...96). That probably means the duplicate detector has some delay on getting its past submissions data. The rate of submissions these days seems to average one a minute, but the delta on this pair may be different, and it is not apparent by now.
Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6999094
Curiously, the URL seems exactly identical in both submissions, which are almost consecutive ( ...94, ...96). That probably means the duplicate detector has some delay on getting its past submissions data. The rate of submissions these days seems to average one a minute, but the delta on this pair may be different, and it is not apparent by now.
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The success of git is - apart from the speed - related with its property of being the "stupid content tracker". Git's architecture is a simple bottom-up engineering approach. The user interface (porcellain) builts upon a conceptually simple core (plumbing). Other VCS have defined nice UI which where then implemented by a core that depends on the UI. This top-down approach means that the core components can suddenly b…
> It turns out however that Git is really easy to grasp. Please write something to explain it. I must be pretty dumb, because I don't get it, even after reading about ten explanatory texts.
>git won the mindshare war. I regret this - I would have preferred Mercurial, but it too is not looking real healthy these days I confess that my perception of Mercurial is the diametric opposite of the author's. Recently I believe I have seen a modest resurgence of interest in Hg and increased uptake. Am I just seeing this through some peculiar VCS-warped glasses? I believe that much of the popularity of git stems f…
Bitbucket provides a good service.
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Compared to the decision (and ability) to contribute to Emacs, the choice of DVCS seems to be rather unimportant.
The impression I have is that bzr is just another roadblock between a potentially interested novice and a patch accepted into the Emacs source. (It's not by far the largest one, though, and while I think esr has a point, I also think it'd be of help for some of the current Emacs developers to publish a "How to start hacking Emacs" document, for the benefit of people like me who would love to contribute but who have a…
1. Find thing you don't like 2. M-x find-function RET function-to-fix RET 3. Hack hack hack (use C-M-x or M-x eval-buffer liberally; also, read about edebug) 4. Make diff relative to Emacs base code 5. Send diff to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
What I love about hacking on Emacs is that it's so easy to find the bit of code responsible for a given feature and hack on that code in a running editor. There's nothing like it. If I'm using Firefox and don't like the address bar, I need to go dig through XUL, find the thing I don't like, and restart Firefox. Emacs? You just find the function and edit it right in the editor.
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I'd say git is popular not just because of Linus, but also because it is oriented towards "just getting stuff done", rather than towards theoretical concepts. You can rewrite history, fix your mistakes, and generally do whatever you want. When merging, git isn't picky, either: if the code looks the same, it is the same. In-place branching is hugely useful, just switch your tree in an instant (your editor should updat…
Except bzr is conceptually easier to learn and has a more consistent command syntax than git.
Oddly, both Bazaar, Git and Mercurial were created around March/April 2005. Why the sudden appearance of popular DVCSs around that time, and why did Bazaar fall behind the other two in popularity?
Cambrian explosion followed by consolidation. Git and Mercurial were Linux affiliated. In the end, when apps are similar and don't have fatal flaws, it comes down to a popularity contest.
The term is "adaptive radiation", of which the Cambrian explosion is a prominent example. (Unrelated but awesome note: search for "edicarian biota" to look at some body plans that might have won, but didn't.)