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

[Juanma Barranquero <lekktu@gmail.com>]

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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.

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).

My 0.02¢

      Juanma

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