Re: On the popularity of git [Was: Git question: when using branches, how does git treat working files when changing branches?]

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Juanma Barranquero <lekktu@gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 6:02 PM, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:
>
>> I've been wondering about git's popularity for some long time.  That
>> git's complexity is not necessary in a powerful VCS is demonstrated by
>> the counterexamples of hg and (to a lesser extent) bzr.
>>
>> git had (and has) Linux behind it, thus giving a lot of hackers being
>> forced to learn git early on.  This surely gave git a huge advantage in
>> numbers at the start of the competition.
>
> Of course there's not a single factor that made git so popular, but there
> are a few ones that surely weighted in the final situation.
>
> In no particular order:
>
> - Not only git has Linux behind, but it has *Linus* behind. He is revered
> by a lot of hackers, who give a lot of weight to his opinions.
> - It's *very* fast.
> - Its foundation (its data model) is seen as elegant, even if its UI is
> less than friendly.
> - It's very flexible and hackable, and built from basic components, in the
> "software tools" spirit.
> - It was perceived as a David vs Goliath thing. BitKeeper pulls out, Linus
> builds a replacement in a few days.
> - It really hadn't much competition. Subversion, though good, is not
> distributed. Bazaar was too slow. Mercurial had no critical mass. Other
> alternatives (svk, Darcs. etc.) were even more marginal.
> - It had, since the beginning, an active development community. Other dVCS
> have smaller development communities (think Bazaar...) so it has progressed
> at a good pace.
>
> All of these (IMHO, of course) and others that I forget surely contributed
> to its gaining momentum.

When did this stop being the Emacs developer list and became fairytale
central?

The rise of Git to its current prominence did not occur while Linus was
in control of it but far, far later.

Emacs has been developed as tarballs from private directories, using
RCS, CVS, Arch (non-canonically, but every Emacs source file at least
had an Arch tag) and eventually Bazaar.  None of those choices were
unreasonable considering the respective state of the art.  Nor was the
choice of XEmacs to change from CVS (?) to Mercurial.  All of the above
cited reasons are not really in any temporal proximity to Git becoming a
mainstream entity.

What's more relevant is the rise of GitHub vs Launchpad as a major
hosting point, and a main factor for that has been that Git's C and
POSIX history and data formats and workflows made it reasonably
straightforward to map to servers, resulting in dozens of Git-based web
solutions fighting it out.

GitHub is just the most prominent survivor, and unfortunately a
proprietary one.  There never was a similar tug-o-war for web solutions
based on a particular other version control system.

> Whether git is the best tool or not is largely irrelevant now. I think
> even detractors have to admit it works well enough and it's fast and
> responsive, and even its more ardent evangelists won't discuss its
> abysmal UI (whenever I'm starting to like it, I do "git help log" and
> I'm suddenly cured).

For better or worse, the "user interface" that has won is GitHub.

-- 
David Kastrup