Comment by kadenshep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kadenshep | Hacker News Reader

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>I dunno why you have a hardon to smear BK, but bring it dude,

Excuse me? You brought up BitKeeper. You're the one that claimed I've never used a sane SCM, because you think BitKeeper is sane and I clearly didn't include that in my list of the World's Most Sane SCM's list. Added bonus for the claim we're all "missing out" on sanity.

Here I'll even link you to the post you made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16806588 And a screenshot https://imgur.com/a/JO8IE

>I'm happy to make you look foolish.

You're actively on this forum basically demonstrating why BitKeeper and other SCM's have lost. You bring up silly things like templated commit messages, random anecdotes that don't technically make any sense, and claim annotating/blaming history in files is hard to do in git.

>These days we do quite well and we do it correctly.

Some guy got so pissed off at your SCM and made a new for one free, without wasting untold amounts of man hours and capital. And he wasn't the only one (Mercurial). He did it so well that other companies now use his SCM as a cornerstone for their platforms (GitHub and BitBucket).

> He did it so well that other companies now use his SCM as a cornerstone for their platforms (GitHub and BitBucket).

I think this is your fundamental misunderstanding. Git would be another esoteric tool for crazy kernel devs without GitHub. Git won because of GitHub. Very simple. Out in the real world of teams of 12 developers rewriting the same business logic over and over until they retire, Git is GitHub. I've worked with several developers who don't understand the difference, and think that they're using the GitHub client whenever they interact with Git locally (and, if they use GitHub Desktop, they are). All your discussion about git's dominance being a testament to the tractability of the git UI is a false equivalence.

GitHub could switch to BitKeeper under the covers overnight, and as long as they branded it in a non-scary way, very few people would know the difference.

When is it ever the case that general acceptance means "objectively the best" instead of "obviously the path of least resistance"?

>Git won because of GitHub

No it didn't. GitHub was built because of git's popularity. That's a really silly claim to make and doesn't even logically make sense. The tool was popular, someone built a hosted service for it.

Like think about the insanity of what you're saying. A company was built around some "esoteric" tool, despite plenty of alternatives existing at the time and you think people just whimsically invested in this company because of... what exactly?

You're literally just talking from historical ignorance and making up shit. It's so easy to verify any of the claims you decided to type out yet you chose not to anyway. GitHub believed in Git's popularity, and it paid off.

>I've worked with several developers who don't understand the difference

That's a really neat anecdotal story.

>GitHub could switch to BitKeeper under the covers overnight

No they couldn't. They couldn't even switch to it over a two year time frame. You are making absolutely ridiculous claims with nothing to back it up. BitBucket, owned by Atlassian, has hosted Mercurial repositories. Don't see anyone lining up to switch over to Mercurial.

A really easy claim that is obviously negated by a practical example and you still chose to make it? Legitimately silly.

>All your discussion about git's dominance being a testament to the tractability of the git UI is a false equivalence.

That's not even what that word means.

>When is it ever the case that general acceptance means "objectively the best" instead of "obviously the path of least resistance"?

Don't know if you were around for when git was released but there is now a whole graveyard of SCM's that people actively dropped to switch to git. And BitKeeper was definitely one of them. But I guess those were all dropped because of a future platform that no one knew about at the time. Heavy sarcasm by the way.

> Don't know if you were around for when git was released but there is now a whole graveyard of SCM's that people actively dropped to switch to git.

Indeed I was, and FWIW I distinctly remember everyone throwing their weight behind Mercurial, in large part for its superior cross-platform support.

I stand by my position. git usage would be minor without GitHub. GitHub could switch off git if they wanted to and they'd take most of the git user base with them.

>I distinctly remember everyone throwing their weight behind Mercurial

Except for nearly every single open source project.

>Mercurial, in large part for its superior cross-platform support.

And then that got side stepped by the obvious problems with repository size and branching issues (that hg would go onto address later).

>I stand by my position.

If you want to ignore a pretty basic historical timeline that's totally up to you.

I agree with cookiecaper. We went hard (for us) into marketing before giving up and what we learned by going to dev conferences is that people think GitHub is source management. If you talk about any sort of workflow other than what github provides you can just see their brain switch off.

It's sad, because there are other useful work flows, but GitHub is SCM at this point. I agree with what someone said elsewhere, they could swap out git for bitkeeper and nobody would care (well the people that are still butthurt over the licensing would whine but it's apache v2 now, that should be good enough).

>If you talk about any sort of workflow other than what github provides you can just see their brain switch off.

I'm sorry, what dev conferences are you going to? You're kind of just claiming that these same people are too stupid to understand what git allows you to do out of the box so they wouldn't mind BitKeeper's (or any other SCM like it) problems and limitations as long as GitHub hosted it for them with a nice logo (which again, isn't true because other hosted SCM's solutions lost as well). That's just incredibly tone deaf and doesn't make sense from a historical timeline perspective. This is just straight up denial at this point.

>well the people that are still butthurt over the licensing would whine but it's apache v2 now, that should be good enough

It's not just a licensing issue and you know it. You are being dishonest with everyone here and yourself. There is a historical record in the lkml archives that you're choosing to ignore.

Bitbucket functionality was nearly identical to GitHub. Plus there was a bunch of other code hosting platforms, e.g. Sourceforge and Google Code.

So what's so special about GitHub if not Git? Slightly better UI?

I think network effect and the fact that the linux kernel was in git. When the kernel was using BitKeeper that was huge for us, people went "welp, if it's good enough for the kernel it's good enough for us".

And I think, might be wrong, but I think github was first.

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