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Comment by beat | Hacker News Reader

I should add here that the "antiquation" case is the one that has caused the most observed grief in my career. The forces causing failure are coming from outside the code/business (dependence on an outside vendor), and sometimes collide with forward momentum of other parts of the code (i.e. that graph library will never, ever work with Java 7, to name an example). These become life-or-death situations, and the tendrils of the product dependency are often deeply integrated. It might be easier to rewrite than to fix.

Also, this case can impact not just products, but organizations. You can still find teams dependent on an antique commercial version control system or IDE that greatly slows down or even stops work. I've tech-led jumps to new version control systems a few times, and it's always riddled with anxiety, strain, and management angst. (And it always makes the team far happier and more productive!)

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>You can still find teams dependent on an antique commercial version control system or IDE that greatly slows down or even stops work.

Sounds like Rational ClearCase.

Yeah, that. But even things like cvs, that were modern and hip in 1998, are still floating around 20 years later.

I actually thought Subversion would be the last version control system, when it came out. Of course, now it's git. Maybe someday we'll get something better, and git will look decrepit.

I have little doubt that git will be replaced eventually (or perhaps severely modified). It seems like a fad to me. It is indeed very powerful, but its UI is sheer insanity. At least SVN is very straightforward to use and understand. It just doesn't offer the distributed nature that git does, as it relies on a centralized server.

The cool thing about Git is that the underpinnings ultimately boil down to a key-value data store.

I'm not an expert on these innerworkings, but in theory there's nothing stopping someone from creating a new UI that maintains most or all of the same strengths, except that everyone already uses and is used to the current way.

I suspect if you came out with "SuperVCS" that was ultimately just a new UI on Git you'd have more success than releasing the exact same project as some kind of Git enhancement.

Isn't that basically Gitless? (http://gitless.com/)

What UI? Using git on the command line is exactly the same as using SVN on the command line. At least for basic, every day things like status, add, commit etc.

> I've tech-led jumps to new version control systems a few times, and it's always riddled with anxiety, strain, and management angst. (And it always makes the team far happier and more productive!)

In the cases of this I've seen, it's always been because management and team priorities were unaligned.

Management in those places cared about a minimum level of productivity and minimizing risk.

Teams cared about maximizing productivity and their work days not sucking.

As long as teams kept managing to soldier through... rarely saw things change in those shops.

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