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20 years of Git

blog.gitbutler.com

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Re: 20 years of Git

#121

Post by pseudalopex »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #71
jordigh wrote: post #65

There’s something that bothers me about these sorts of recollections that make git seem… inevitable. There’s this whole creation myth of how Git came to be that kind of paints Linus as some prophet reading from golden tablets written by the CS gods themselves. Granted, this particular narrative in the blog post does humanise a bit more, remembering the stumbling steps, how Linus never intended for git itself to be th…

[flagged]

> And it’s doubly tragic because Mercurial is much better than Git. It’s VHS vs Betamax all over again.

VHS won because it was cheaper and could record longer. Fidelity was similar at the recording speeds people used in practice.

Re: 20 years of Git

#122

Post by impish9208 »

lowboy wrote: post #63
esafak wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long did it take you to become proficient? I assume your organization uses git and you use jujitsu locally, as a layer on top?

Not parent, but for me it was a couple hours of reading (jj docs and steve's tutorial), another couple hours playing around with a test repo, then a couple weeks using it in place of git on actual projects where I was a bit slower. After that it's been all net positive. Been using it on top of git, collaborating with people via Github repos for ~11 mos now. I'm more efficient than I was in git, and it's a smoother ex…

> Every once and a while…

The expression is “every once in a while” :).

Re: 20 years of Git

#123

Post by cpeterso »

cjbillington wrote: post #111
TiredOfLife wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it won (10+ years ago) because for some reason git (a deeply linux oriented software) had better Windows support than Mercurial (that boasted about Windows support). You could even add files with names in various writing systems to git. I am not sure that Mercurial can do that even now.

Huh, that's not my recollection. Mercurial on windows was "download tortoisehg, use it", whereas git didn't have a good GUI and was full of footguns about line endings and case-insensitivity of branch names and the like. Nowadays I use sublime merge on Windows and Linux alike and it's fine. Which solves the GUI issue, though the line ending issue is the same as it's always been (it's fine if you remember to just set…

When evaluating successors to CVS back in 2007, Mozilla chose Mercurial because it had better Windows support than git. 18 years later, Mozilla is now migrating from Mercurial to git.

Re: 20 years of Git

#124

Post by emmelaich »

schacon wrote: post #74
brandonmenc wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was always under the impression Monotone - which was released two years before Mercurial - was the inspiration for git, and that this was pretty well known.

This is all fairly speculative, but I didn't get the impression that Monotone was a main inspiration for Git. I think BitKeeper was, in that it was a tool that Linus actually liked using. Monotone had the content addressable system, which was clearly an inspiration, but that's the only thing I've seen Linus reference from Monotone. He tried using it and bailed because it was slow, but took the one idea that he found…

Linus was definitely aware of and mentioned Monotone. But to call it an inspiration might be too far. Content Addressable Stores were around a long time before that, mostly for backup purposes afaik. See Plan9's Venti file system.

Re: 20 years of Git

#125

Post by bryanlarsen »

cryptonector wrote: post #99
eterm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What surprises me more is how young Subversion is in comparison to git, it's barely older. I guess I started software dev at a magic moment pre-git but after SVN was basically everywhere, but it felt even more like it had been around forever vs the upstart git.

> What surprises me more is how young Subversion is in comparison to git, it's barely older. Subversion was so awful that it had to be replaced ASAP.

True. Also, Subversion was so great that it very quickly replaced the alternatives that predated it.

Re: 20 years of Git

#126

Post by fatata123 »

pseudalopex wrote: post #117
schacon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One particular aspect that often gets left out of this creation myth, especially by the author of Github is that Mercurial had a prominent role." implies to me that Hg had a role in the creation of Git, which is why I was reacting to that. For the deadnaming comment, it wasn't out of disrespect, but when referring to an email chain, it could otherwise be confusing if you're not aware of her transition. I wasn't spon…

> For the deadnaming comment, it wasn't out of disrespect, but when referring to an email chain, it could otherwise be confusing if you're not aware of her transition. I assumed it was innocent. But the norm when naming a married woman or another person who changed their name is to call them their current name and append the clarifying information. Not vice versa. Jane Jones née Smith. Olivia (then Matt).

[dead]

Re: 20 years of Git

#127

Post by pseudalopex »

talles wrote: post #69

Why did git 'won' over mercurial? Because Github was better than Bitbucket? Or maybe because of the influence of kernel devs?

GitHub executed better than Bitbucket. And the Ruby community adopted GitHub early. Comparisons around 2010 said GitHub's UX and network effects were top reasons to choose Git. Mecurial's UX and Windows support were top reasons to choose Mercurial.

Re: 20 years of Git

#128

Post by tikhonj »

jordigh wrote: post #65

There’s something that bothers me about these sorts of recollections that make git seem… inevitable. There’s this whole creation myth of how Git came to be that kind of paints Linus as some prophet reading from golden tablets written by the CS gods themselves. Granted, this particular narrative in the blog post does humanise a bit more, remembering the stumbling steps, how Linus never intended for git itself to be th…

Another alternative is the patch-theory approach from Darcs and now Pijul. It's a fundamentally different way of thinking about version control—I haven't actually used it myself but, from reading about it, I find thinking in patches matches my natural intuition better than git's model. Darcs had some engineering limitations that could lead to really bad performance in certain cases, but I understand Pijul fixes that.

Re: 20 years of Git

#129

Post by emmelaich »

mrlonglong wrote: post #61
eterm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What surprises me more is how young Subversion is in comparison to git, it's barely older. I guess I started software dev at a magic moment pre-git but after SVN was basically everywhere, but it felt even more like it had been around forever vs the upstart git.

I'm old enough to have used RCS. Very primitive and CVS was soon in use. Git is a breath of fresh air compared to these ones.

I still use RCS, typically for admin files like fstab or other config files in /etc.

Doing `ci -l` on a file is better and faster than `cp fstab fstab.$(date +%Y%m%d.%H%M%S)`

Re: 20 years of Git

#130

Post by [deleted] »

frutiger wrote: post #97
kbolino wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The RFC defining them says they're the same and has since the earliest draft I can find, also from 2002. You should offer more explanation when you take a stance contrary to what is well documented.

A hash is not globally unique. I'm not sure what more explanation is needed.

[deleted]
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