GCC is moving to git
gcc.gnu.org
gcc.gnu.org
This doesn't matter: hg/Mercurial has to be 500% better than git to be able to replace it.
Look at the past changes: they've all been huge shifts in how we do version control, not minor improvements
The DVCSs were 500% better than Subversion (wow, distributed!)
Subversion was 500% better than CVS (wow, renames work! Branching is easy! http support!)
CVS was 500% better than RCS (wow, we can check out files concurrently)
when svn first came out (and up until a few years ago) branching was definitely not easy!
Before this, merging branches was a huge pain, because you had to manually keep track of the commits that needed to be merged.
http://www.minidisc.org/econ113-paper.htm
A technology needs to be 10x better than a previous one for widespread adoption. It has successfully explained many failed technologies and products.
A hypothesis about failure, on the other hand, has to account for the failures and successes. This one doesn't. While it can plausibly explain failed technologies and products, it doesn't explain the historic success of junk that is worse than its predecessors.
A technology can be hyped into widespread adoption. It can be dumped on the market for widespread adoption. It can ride on top of cheap hardware for widespread adoption. It can be bundled with something else, achieving widespread adoption. A technology can be falsely evaluated as 10X better by a large number of complete idiots, resulting in widespread adoption among idiots, resulting in pressure for non-idiots to adopt.
All these effects can overcome the barrier of having to be actually, objectively 10X better. The "10X better adoption barrier" is only faced by honestly promoted technologies whose campaign consists of "try this because it's better for these objective reasons".
With the ultimate irony that people largely use it in a centralized fashion.
DNS is distributed, yet it has a "root" servers.
Even if there a master repository in a given git scenario, it is still distributed because developers have their own repositories, which are independent, and contain a replica of the copies of the upstream objects.
The Linux kernel is a proper example of distributed workflow.
Even if you consider the SPOF-y nature of something like GitHub, more savvy git users will realize that if GitHub was down for an extended period of time, they could push their repo somewhere else that's public, like Bitbucket, or their own server, and keep working and allowing other people to collaborate. And for shorter downtime of the central server (where you might feel like setting up an alternate is too much effort), everyone can still get work done, they just can't collaborate as effectively until things are restored.
The amount of force required to move an object at rest is greater than the amount of force required to maintain it already moving (or something like that).
If you're going to attract new contributors to a system, having the toolset that everyone else uses is a huge win.
I've been at this long enough to have learned (somewhat) each of RCS, CVS, SVN hg, and git. In the beginning there were (mostly) just two: RCS and SCCS, and nobody used SCCS. With time, I've touched several others, had to wrap my head around them, as additional challenges to getting my primary job done, which generally involved solving problems in other domains (or learning other tool).
And ... some of that's knowledge which has stuck, some isn't. The time invested in learning is sunk cost, though there's the problem that it all leaves traces on your brain.
This is something that 20-somethings don't get: it's not learning things so much as unlearning. It's one thing to launch into a field with the hot new technology under your belt. I landed with some awarness of Unix when that was fairly unusual, and parlayed that and a set of tools for 25 years. During which I've not stood still...
... but the rate at which new tools are introduced, and having to sort out which actually will win is a considerable overhead. After a while it ... just gets kind of old. Especially since you realize that all of it is a constructed complexity, largely arbitrary.
How many operating systems (7, not counting Unix variants), shells (9), editors (10+), scripting languages (8), database implementations (7), firewall systems (4), webservers / application engines (6), mailservers (6), document markup languages (6+), etc., etc., etc., do you want to learn over your lifetime? Some are pretty cool. Others ... are just makework.
This spills over to larger highly integrated stuff which previous experience shows is almost always going to be a massive clusterfuck, of which I'll not mention systemd by name.
Which means you want to consider what projects you work on, where you work, etc. Google have a challenge in this regard with their NIH model -- work at Google long enough and you'll learn some really cool, advanced technology. Which nobody, anywhere else, uses. And, no, they're not the only ones. But they definitely come to mind.
Been in the industry since the late 80's. Eventually one gets tired of listening to every single fad.
On the rare cases syntax does change people raise holy hell. It can kill tools. Especially if done more than once.
GUIs have none of these features and change capriciously.This tends to keep user proficiency at a low general level over time.
Web apps only extend this.
One of the most important parts of my job as a sysadmin is the immediate sniff test on trendy technology of the week and being able to spot the obvious pain points early. Bitter experience, it's useful!
(TODO: pointy-clicky interface to systemd)
The last few weeks, after using git for a decade now I guess, I had to use CVS to checkout and contribute some changes to a project still using CVS. Wow, was that painful! One does get used to the simplicty and features of git, and going backward to older tools makes one really appreciate what they give you.
[1] ... in that it provides not just safe mutable history, but shared mutable history.
I use github as a backend, so I tend to do branch manipulation using the github UI, so this isn't an issue for me.
Everything else Just Works. Highly recommended.
Unless your project is weighty enough to have its own gravitational pull, github is a ridiculously easy place to contribute and make life easy for contributors.
Git does something very well: it has great support for rewriting version histories. It nearly flawlessly supports almost every conceivable scenario of slicing, dicing, mixing and combining.
It also has great support for working at the sub-file granularity. For instance, this morning I moved a fix from an experimental branch to stable. The fix was part of a huge commit, and consisted of just a few "hunks" out of many in one file. It was obvious that the particular fix, though needed by the experimental changes, could be promoted to stable (it was a change of the kind where some code is altered in such a way that it no longer interacts with the experimental changes, and is improved at the same time.) With git I easily rewrote that big commit such that just those specific changes in the specific file were removed from that commit. This was done without touching anything in the working copy not so much as altering any modification timestamp! ("make" didn't even see that anything needed to be rebuilt after the commit rewrite.) In git we can do "keep my working copy as it is, but alter the history behind it, so those alterations then appear as staged, uncommitted changes". Then we can easily migrate the changes somewhere, like turning it into its own commit, perhaps on another branch. After I migrated those changes to master, I then went back to that branch and did a "git rebase". Lo and behold, that branch picked up the changes, and now it looks as if those changes were written on master all along, before the experimental changes were developed.
Programmers need this kind of thing because we are obsessed about making the perfect set of changes. Since the history of a code base is a digital artifact, we want to be able to hack that artifact to perfection too, not just the instantaneous/current view of the code itself.
Git is also like an adventure game in which you solve quests and acquire higher and higher status. This creates allure. The Novice Adventurer cannot understand all the reasons why the Grandmaster Wizards of GCC have switched to Git, but is mystified and fascinated.
A rewritten branch isn't hard to pick up. Git tells you that the history has diverged (N commits here, M over there). If none of the local history is yours, you can just throw it away with a "git reset --hard <origin>/<branch>". Or else you can rebase those changes which are yours.
It's only bad to rewrite "really public" branches that are distributed to the world. Even then, it can be okay to clean up some oops: like seconds after pushing a release, some last minute change needs to be made (typo in the release notes file or whatever).
Is there some extension that helps?
And that is a nonstarter, once Git has opened your eyes to light-weight rewriting, done casually and frequently.
Here's how you do it:
hg histedit -r .
# change "pick" to "edit" in the edit plan.
hg commit -i
hg commit
hg histedit --continue
hg histedit -r .
hg shelve -i
# test that it works
hg commit
hg unshelve
hg commit
hg histedit --continue
That splits the commit in two; use hg graft or hg rebase to move the commits to different branches.
> Its always a huge pain point.
Not sure why; Mercurial's commands for history editing are conceptually pretty similar to Git's. I suspect that it's mostly a difference in familiarity with the tools.
It's not that it's impossible, but that it was not clearly described how to do it right, in contrast to the Git documentation. Now that I've been using Git for nearly three years, and have used it to save my bacon, I'm sure I could find some way to do similar with Mercurial ... but only after having learned it with git.
`hg record` might be somewhat more cumbersome than `git add -p`. But `hg rebase` should about as nice as `git rebase`?
Early on when Git was still new, I read about the different types of objects (files, trees, commit objects) and how they interact, and everything just clicked. It's the correct model for version control, and I like to believe that that's why it's winning.
In fact, all your praise for Git is something that, as far as I see it, flows directly from Git having the correct model for version control.
The fundamental concepts in all the DVCS's are almost indistinguishable; they're just packaged slightly differently.
It's tempting to seek a technological explanation for git's dominance; but all the obvious signs point to it simply being first-mover advantage. Where the other DVCS's do have technical advantages, they're rarely very significant for most people.
But Git was not a first mover. That simple model was pioneered by Monotone. Git won because Linus' use case required high performance. DVCS flows from that (no waiting on the network), as does the index, and it just made for a huge difference in user experience.
git+hg share the same model for history; that's a DAG of commits. Sure, there are differences, but they're rather superficial. One such difference is in how you, as a human, categorize commits in that dag - what git calls a branch isn't what hg calls a branch. But so what?
In day-to-day use I can't imagine that the vast majority of git users would really notice a ifference if they used hg instead; and I suspect the same thing holds for bzr too. There's no meaningful performance difference. But the point is also that reverse is mostly true too - why not choose git it it's good enough?
And then git's real advantage shines through - it's by far the most common, and that lets you cooperate with a large number of other developers simply because lots of people know git. Oh, and github is popular too and git-only. Then there's the fact that bzr seems dead, as does monotone. The advantage is largely social - though if the currect pace of development continues it way well become technical.
I couldn't care less if Git stopped making releases; what I'm using isn't the latest anyway and does everything I want. (Though I'd like any newly discovered security holes to be fixed in any pieces of Git that face the Internet; e.g. via embedding in CGIT).
Official Git repo: https://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=emacs
Unofficial github mirror repo: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs
https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc
It seems out of sync though.
None of the GNU projects (that I've ever seen) are officially hosted on GitHub.
https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/3hsab9/could_emacs_b...
I have more goodwill towards github than I do for RMS, with his gcc shenanigans.
Either way, GitHub is proprietary, so it is against GNU's principles.
Just like I don't need to see the exact farm where my tomatoes came from, or which mine the metal came from for my car engine, I don't need to see every single line of code for my Netflix player.
Seriously, where's the ethical concern there?
Where do you draw the line from "I don't trust anyone, I need to verify everything", to "I trust them enough to not worry too much", to "I don't care"?
Not that your analogy is even correct. An end product like metal would be more like a circuit, not amenable to modification in of itself. The Netflix player is general-purpose software running on your property which you are forbidden from studying, using for any purpose, modifying or redistributing. The ethical concerns are enormous and no metaphor to physical objects is applicable when the stakes are so different.
Voluntary association does tend to work in this case, but it doesn't change the fact that a party is engaging in unethical behavior. Furthermore, the ultimate end result of "Don't like it, don't use it" is the erosion of choice.
You are NOT required to use any proprietary software.
Oh, hell yes, you are. Government agencies, who have a duty to serve the public, run proprietary software all the time. Meaning they are deprived of computational sovereignty and cannot guarantee they are performing their duties unfettered. If you've been to public school in most countries, you are taught to use proprietary software in IT classes. An institution devoted to learning compels students to use software that explicitly forbids being learned from and studied. Even more harmful are proprietary formats, which are like a lock and time bomb on your data, yet are ubiquitous.
Network services are a big ethical dilemma of their own and yet practically unavoidable.
Software is essential to contemporary civilization, and you will be using lots of proprietary programs. You cannot reasonably expect people to become hermits over it.
It's the same logic as religion, who feels I shouldn't be allowed to marry someone of the same sex even though it doesn't affect them in any way.
What a load of nonsense. It is the proprietary software vendor who deprives users of freedom. Your analogy is backwards and completely inappropriate. Free software mandates you have the freedom to run the program for any purpose, so gay marriage would be unrestricted. Proprietary vendors would have terms that may or may not restrict it.
The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Note that "access to the source code" is not one of the four freedoms -- it's merely a precondition to be able to satisfy them.
ed: It might be interesting to note, that most of these freedoms exist for physical objects: you are generally allowed to fix broken physical things, even those that are under patent protection. Or to make sure stuff fits where you need it. And you generally can sell/give away stuff you're not using. These rights are actually protected by law.
Free software could be viewed as a rather conservative measure towards ensuring that we get these "everyday" rights wrt software as well.
I'm not sure if you were implying that the 4F are replicating what happens with physical objects; I would disagree with this. The 4F expect from software much more than we expect from any other good or service we buy/rent/consume.
You are free to attach a metal head to a shaft and call it a hammer, and look at other hammers for inspiration, if your hammer doesn't work quite right.
You are of course right that it only goes so far -- and this is perhaps most scary in the field of bioengineering -- with the possibility of a) sterile produce (you wouldn't be able to plant a potato any more), and b) patented/"copyrighted" gene sequences -- making it illegal to plant certain "proprietary" produce without a license grant.
I do agree that the analogy is flawed -- is the shape of a fork more like the api or the source code? I suppose the main difference is that many useful physical things are trivial conceptually (once you've had/seen the idea).
Your arguments are framed as if to make them valid, but they are still fallacies. The MIT licence exists for a reason, and the reason it's the most commonly used. It's the non-extremist licence.
Anyway, I'm done. Arguing with extremists is a fools errand. I believe there is a place for all models.
You say that copyleft removes your freedom to choose to distribute a program as proprietary software. This is correct, but you portray it highly disingenuously, like it's an equally weighted choice.
Generally, freedom has the most influence when its recipients are those at a lower position of power. The power of the software vendor is to have full control over the usage of the program, ostensibly either to provide a better UX (which is dubious), to exercise their IP (an ethical landmine), to benefit from unsustainable per-unit business models that ignore software's intrinsically anti-rivalrous, non-scarce and intangible nature, or other reasons.
Let us see how the user is affected. And keep in mind, all programmers are users. Programmers will be using other people's software at dramatically higher quantities than they will ever write anything individually. As such, user freedom is of paramount importance to them.
Now, for a certain amount of convenience on part of the vendor, the user is put in a position where they cannot a) run the program for all purposes that they may desire to use it, b) study and change it to adjust it to their needs, c) share it with friends, neighbors and acquaintances and d) enrich their community by sharing modified copies. In other words, they get software without most of the benefits that actually comes with having things be software in the first place.
As such, the users lose individual and collective control for the benefit of the vendor, but at a deadweight loss for everyone else. Because, when the software leaves the vendor into another person's machine, how it's used is in no natural sense of any interest to them. Not anymore than a chef is interested in how other people use their recipe. This has been accepted as the first-sale doctrine by courts across the world.
I therefore conclude that user freedom should be given at all times where the software is user-facing.
It solves your problems, and mine. Middle ground. Compromise.
What is wrong with MIT?
Thus getting for free the work invested into LLVM, being able to sell the modified version and LLVM developer don't see a dime from it.
The person to whom you replied seems to quite literally be talking about "people who see no ethical concerns with proprietary software" as such. Some people do.
You want to know why they do? There are many resources available online that you can use to read up on why they do. If after reading them you still don't need to see every line of code on your Netflix player, you will still be disingenuous if you pose "problems with proprietary software as such" as some kind of ending of a reductio ad absurdum. Disagreement is fine; you don't need to be confused by it.
I also find people unethical who would go out and punish or actively prevent a fellow human being who seek to understand software which is currently running on a machine that they own.
I also admier people who fixes broken software on their own machines and then goes to share the improvements. I find ethical concerns when people try to prevent those improvements from being run or being shared.
Those proprietary software which isn't covered by the above concerns are unlikely to be ethical concerns to me, but what is then the definition of proprietary software?
> I face backlash from people who see no ethical concerns with proprietary software
I think this could be clearer. RMS himself has stated [0] that selling exceptions is perfectly fine, so even free software zealots do not object to proprietary licensing in all of its forms. I think most people object to proprietary licensing in some forms. This is a case where speaking in riddles and platitudes is not effective policy.
> or who are apologetic to "open source" instead
Again this is a platitude turn of phrase. I support some kinds of open source and not others, as do I expect most thinking people. Does that make me "apologetic"? Am I the problem? No clue.
> Usually it's in the form of some smartass who will redefine the word "freedom" to mean something different from the context at hand
Quite frankly, one could accuse the entire Free Software movement of this, as that is essentially its purpose: to redefine the loaded term "freedom" in a nonintuitive way.
But accepting for the sake of argument the FSF's vision of software "freedom" as the correct definition, I am not convinced it is an actual view instead of a post-hoc rationalization. For example, the FSF claims [1] the RPL is non-free for 3 reasons:
1. It puts limits on prices charged for an initial copy.
2. It requires notification of the original developer for publication of a modified version.
3. It requires publication of any modified version that an organization uses, even privately.
Now my question is this: which of the four freedoms, specifically, give rise to these objections? Because from my POV the RPL not only protects the four freedoms, but does so strongly, for exactly the reasons here that are presented as so-called "objections".
So, the only conclusion that I can draw, is that the 4Fs are a lot of nonsense, a "just-so" story to explain why GPL License is Best License. Freedom is allowed to go so far, but no further, until GPL v4, and then we can go further.
I am sorry if some of this seems trollish or offputting. I promise it is not. I have read probably hundreds of books and essays on this and I cannot find anything that satisfies me that "Free Software" is an intellectually defensible philosophy. This may be because the people who are best-positioned to defend it have better things to do than defend it to me.
I want to like the free software community, and we do collaborate, in a sense, but it is always strategic and not ideological. It just so happens, in cases, the GPL and my objectives are compatible. But the FSF's objectives and my objectives are not really compatible at all. So there is the same funny taste in my mouth from working at cross-purposes that I get when writing proprietary software. It has the same artificiality.
... unless you chose to interpret that as "oh, hey, Clang is using Git, so we (GCC) should too!", which is both incorrect (Clang uses Subversion) and a fairly silly motivation regardless. If that interpretation is both incorrect and silly, why not try for a more reasonable/charitable interpretation like mine? Did it not occur to you?
I'm having a hard time understanding why jussij was down-voted... I suppose it's because people are quick to interpret others in ways that put them down, or because the down-voters lack the intelligence to make the more likely interpretation. Either way, it's disappointing.
No. The pressure comes from gcc developers who prefer git over subversion.
>We should use Bzr because that is becoming a GNU package. GNU packages should show loyalty to each other when possible, and in this case it is possible.[1]
But now its main repository is managed with git[2], Savannah as a whole makes extensive use of git,[3] and Stallman tacitly supports git by linking to git repos from his personal website.[4]
1. http://lwn.net/Articles/272853/ 2. http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs/ 3. http://savannah.gnu.org/maintenance/UsingGit/ 3. https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9292209
But otherwise, rms uses git quite alright. Let's not portray him as any crazier than he actually is.
I call that a bit crazy, but also crazy reasonable, because GNU really is the foundation of the OS, along with Linux.
The operative system running on my laptop and servers is called Debian. The kernel is just one of many packages available in the repository and can be replaced by a single command. Its not even the most significant important package, since libc has a higher impact during upgrades and package dependency.
And yes, I understand RMS's interest in GNU and keeping it in currency. And refer to "GNU/Linux" quite frequently myself.
GNU is a project to create the individual parts which users need to make a operative system, which is why Stallman calls it GNU based operative systems. This is also attached to the historical context of users building their own systems by assembling parts to compile and run.
While we should recognize their historical and current contributions, Debian is based more on their community and policies than on any specific package.
MVS, CMS, VMS, OpenVMS, UNIX, Ultrix, Solaris, AIX, HPUX, DOS, CPM, BSD, MacOS, Windows, BeOS, iOS, Android.
GNU/Linux.
There are times you might specify the user environment. MVS TSO/ISPF, say. Or hardware: VAX/VMS, SolarisX86. But not elsewhere the libraries.
I get RMS's rationale. I largely support and practice it. But it runs against convention and practice through the rest of the industry, for decades.
And mentioning Debian, it's also available without Linux.
Though I agree also really packages & policy.