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Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

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Re: Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

#31

Post by ciupicri »

vidarh wrote: post #24
FrankBooth wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

svn is quite over-engineered and has significantly more dependencies than git. There's no way a statically linked svn would come out smaller than git, so either you're trolling, lying, or stupid. Besides, file sizes of statically linked version control binaries is utterly uninteresting for anyone with an ounce of sanity.

> Besides, file sizes of statically linked version control binaries is utterly uninteresting for anyone with an ounce of sanity. Unless, you, say, want to be able to use it on an embedded device for some reason, or to be able to ship it as part of some project where you have little control over what environment users might want to run it in, say for an IDE running on Android. Or for ports to far more constrained plat…

Why would/do you run git on a mobile device?

Re: Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

#32

Post by rmc »

ggggit wrote: post #5

Tridgwell's "reverse engineering" of BitKeeper is one of the funniest, and at the same time the saddest stories, I've read about software. http://lwn.net/Articles/132938 It's companies like BitKeeper, who think using a command line is "not allowed" that are the reason so much software sucks. The interface Tridgewell used was the only one I'd be interested in. It's something you could build on top of. You could add ab…

You should try using an OS with a proper package manager that can take care of these things.

Re: Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

#33

Post by markokocic »

vog wrote: post #17
thaumaturgy wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it funny to think about how, if Tridge hadn't done what he did, if all of Linus' public shaming of Tridge had done the trick and the Linux kernel had stayed on Bitkeeper, that we wouldn't have had git, or Github? Linus did a good job of coming up with a replacement tool in a hurry, but I'm also grateful to Tridge for poking a stick into the hornets' nest.

We would still have had Darcs [1]. An without its competitors Git and Mercurial, maybe Darcs would have gotten more enthusiasts pushing Darcs to where Git is today. [1] http://darcs.net/

Darcs was pretty neat at the time, especially since it was the only open DVCS. And the theory behind it was interesting to read.

The only problem is that it had a feeling of non-robustness when using it, and because of that I was tempted to have multiple copies of my repos, just in case of corruption. And that kinda defeats the purpose of VCS.

Then, git came along. Although a bit strange in the beginning, especially on windows, it felt robust enough from the start. And it supported multiple workflows. I know that, whatever stupid thing I do in my repo, git will never loose any data, and I'll be able to google an answer how to recover from my mistakes.

That being said, I'm glad darcs is still alive and kicking. Guys behind it are really smart, and who knows what new good ideas can come from it.

Re: Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

#34

Post by JonnieCache »

mmariani wrote: post #26

>+ GIT - the stupid content tracker Hmm… I think Linus thought it was stupid. >+"git" can mean anything, depending on your mood. Or... He was just in the everything-is-stupid mood. >+ - random three-letter combination that is pronounceable, and not actually used by any common UNIX command. The fact that it is a mispronounciation of "get" may or may not be relevant. I think everyone just goes with that. :) >+ - stupid…

He means stupid as in simple, unaware of things it does not need to know. Stupidity and ignorance in software is high praise and it's very difficult to achieve.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_hiding

That style is just linus' way. It comes across as a lot more aggressive on screen than in person. To get a better sense of him, I'd recommend watching this talk he gave evangelising git at google back in 2007. It's pretty entertaining, and very educational on the issues facing VCS designers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

To a certain extent, if you can knock git together in a couple of weeks you get a free pass to talk however you want, as long as you don't hurt anyone.

Re: Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

#36

Post by ontouchstart »

ciupicri wrote: post #31
vidarh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Besides, file sizes of statically linked version control binaries is utterly uninteresting for anyone with an ounce of sanity. Unless, you, say, want to be able to use it on an embedded device for some reason, or to be able to ship it as part of some project where you have little control over what environment users might want to run it in, say for an IDE running on Android. Or for ports to far more constrained plat…

Why would/do you run git on a mobile device?

I am running git on a jailbroken 3G iPad 1 during commute. :)

Re: Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

#37

Post by luriel »

markokocic wrote: post #33
vog wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We would still have had Darcs [1]. An without its competitors Git and Mercurial, maybe Darcs would have gotten more enthusiasts pushing Darcs to where Git is today. [1] http://darcs.net/

Darcs was pretty neat at the time, especially since it was the only open DVCS. And the theory behind it was interesting to read. The only problem is that it had a feeling of non-robustness when using it, and because of that I was tempted to have multiple copies of my repos, just in case of corruption. And that kinda defeats the purpose of VCS. Then, git came along. Although a bit strange in the beginning, especially…

> Darcs was pretty neat at the time, especially since it was the only open DVCS.

You are forgetting Tom Lord's arch, which had a really bizarre interface (even more so than Darcs), but was conceptually very nice.

Re: Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

#38

Post by jeltz »

vog wrote: post #17
thaumaturgy wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it funny to think about how, if Tridge hadn't done what he did, if all of Linus' public shaming of Tridge had done the trick and the Linux kernel had stayed on Bitkeeper, that we wouldn't have had git, or Github? Linus did a good job of coming up with a replacement tool in a hurry, but I'm also grateful to Tridge for poking a stick into the hornets' nest.

We would still have had Darcs [1]. An without its competitors Git and Mercurial, maybe Darcs would have gotten more enthusiasts pushing Darcs to where Git is today. [1] http://darcs.net/

There would also be Monotone which had its first release in 2003. So we would have at least two distributed version control systems.

Re: Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

#39

Post by jeltz »

dspillett wrote: post #23
vog wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We would still have had Darcs [1]. An without its competitors Git and Mercurial, maybe Darcs would have gotten more enthusiasts pushing Darcs to where Git is today. [1] http://darcs.net/

Has Linus ever said why he disregarded Darcs and the other OSS options (wasn't Mercurial already starting to get somewhere at that time?). Other projects not mature enough yet (and/or moving fast enough in that direction) and he wanted something now ? Or some technical points that he disagreed on, so wrote his own solution that worked the way he preferred instead of trying to change the established workings of other…

> Has Linus ever said why he disregarded Darcs and the other OSS options (wasn't Mercurial already starting to get somewhere at that time?).

I think you might be thinking of Monotone here. Mercurial was started some days after git.

EDIT: Wikipedia has some info about what Linus thought of Monotone. The key problem with it was performance. I have no idea to what degree they have been fixed today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotone_%28software%29#Monoto...

Re: Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

#40

Post by mmariani »

JonnieCache wrote: post #34
mmariani wrote: post #26

>+ GIT - the stupid content tracker Hmm… I think Linus thought it was stupid. >+"git" can mean anything, depending on your mood. Or... He was just in the everything-is-stupid mood. >+ - random three-letter combination that is pronounceable, and not actually used by any common UNIX command. The fact that it is a mispronounciation of "get" may or may not be relevant. I think everyone just goes with that. :) >+ - stupid…

He means stupid as in simple, unaware of things it does not need to know. Stupidity and ignorance in software is high praise and it's very difficult to achieve. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_hiding That style is just linus' way. It comes across as a lot more aggressive on screen than in person. To get a better sense of him, I'd recommend watching this talk he gave evangelising git at google back in 20…

Ouch! No heed to be harsh. I certainly appreciate Linus's work. Kudos to him! I understood his point on the stupidity thing. It even took some laughs out of me. And that's the reason I posted that, so other people could too.

I don't mean to start a flamewar on scm, really. But I think git is overly complicated, and I believe I'm not alone on that.

Anyway, don't take things too seriously and have a good one!

PS: You gave a great idea. I should email Linus and offer to pay him some beers. That sure will be a great talk. Thanks mate!

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