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Comment by maxpert | Hacker News Reader

It's good to see so many SCM systems showing up. But it makes me wonder how many of them can actually work on GBs of codebase with over 1000 of programmers checking in on daily basis. I my experience most of SCMs are fine for small to medium projects, but they go down with crawling speeds and sometimes even not working at all when it goes large scale.

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Hmm, really?

It's hard to measure objectively... but my perception was always that there was an explosion of SCMs around the early-mid 2000s, after everybody got sick of CVS, but eventually Git won out and a lot of the alternatives / diversity in the space went away.

Within short succession, there was Subversion, Arch, Darcs, Quilt, Bazaar, Mercurial. On the commercial side, perforce had a certain amount of traction, and the Linux kernel was using BitKeeper... which no doubt encouraged a lot of the innovation in the open-source space.

Then, once Git was developed, got huge exposure and traction through the Kernel, and GitHub came onto the scene, it quickly became dominant - despite the alternatives, and despite the goofy interface.

I firmly believe that GitHub has at least 40% role in git's success. Another 40% is Linus, and the remaining 20% is git's technical merits.

Sounds about right to me... but it's hard to decouple things so neatly. It wouldn't really be possible to create an SVNHub that worked as well as github.

wrt SVNHub, well, probably you're right. But on the technical level any <insert your DVCS>Hub would be at least nearly as good as GitHub. And git didn't invent DVCS.

Before everyone got onto GitHub, there was SourceForge and GoogleCode. Both worked well for a lot of people for quite some while. Also, if you really want to, you can use the SVN interface of GitHub and never go through git. You could, in its time, also use Google code with git repositories but without the pileup if nice little things that make GitHub more than just a git hosting service

SVN is still quite popular. I'd definitely not bundle it with Arch, Darcs, Quilt or Bazaar, in that regard ;)

Fossil is not really built with that development model in mind. It's built for development of sqlite, which has a small group of core developers that know each other.

Richard Hipp explains the target market at the beginning of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ceEWWqaVsI

It's been working really well for Tcl development as well. Tk, and many other Tcl extensions as well.

I tried to ask a couple of days ago if anybody has started using bitkeeper lately but either only one person saw it or only one other person found it interesting:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13661662

I missed that, but I'm interested in the answer too. I believe the bitkeeper guy frequents this forum. Haven't tried it, myself.

Haven't tried it, myself.

Neither have I and I am a bit hesitant to throw all my tooling out of the window (ok, mostly hosted git + git extensions + builtin git + svn support in all my IDEs (Netbeans/VS/Rider).

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