On the other hand, git became successful by being fast and by not solving certain of the hard theoretical problems that specialists were obsessed with solving. It's hard to know before hand what the healthy compromise might be.
If you compare git to rival tools such as Mercurial and Fossil or even Darcs, it's pretty evident that git didn't really win on technical merit, user friendliness or indeed hardly any other metric. It was fast, and it had the dubious advantage of being better than a lot of crappy alternatives at the time, and of being the product of a famous developer. But if technical merit was how we chose software, we might all be using Mercurial today. It's quite possible we'd be better off, too.
git's punting of "certain of the hard theoretical problems" lead to major shortcomings in its design. For example, git does not track branching histories. Once you merge your changes back into a branch and delete the origin branch, the path that your commits took are lost. Another example: Since git's data model works entirely on repository snapshots (there are no "patches" or logical operations, only snapshots), it doesn't know about file renames. Some commands, like log and diff, do understand how to detect renames (but not out of the box!), but it's fundamentally a fuzzy-matching operation that can only work perfectly if you separate your rename commits from modification commits, which is rarely feasible.
Don't get me wrong, git has overall been a force for good, but I think it's a pretty terrible example in this particular case. In fact, I'm not sure I can think of many cases where the "worse is better" philosophy was ultimately a good idea. In every instance that comes to mind (MySQL, MongoDB, PHP), the fast-and-loose attitude ultimately came back to hurt everyone, and years were spent paying for those mistakes, plugging one hole at a time.
The original decision by the Go team to build package management into the language ("go get") was made without really understanding the problem, and this decision has been haunting us pretty much since day one, with developers having to chase unofficial package management tools of the week in order to get their work done. I really want it to be done right, even if takes a bit longer. It's a problem worth solving well.
> git may have become successful, but that doesn't mean it's right.
If bitbucket had that business model instead of the inverse we’d all think of git as that weird bad hg that Linus forces the Linux devs to use.
Git is a classic example of other factors than the software driving use.
Seriously give it a try
Git would be dead on the water if it wasn't for being written by Linus and a requirement to interact with Linux development.
Your statement is only true to the degree that it's a tautology: Git's popularity demonstrates that it's right and the definition of "right" is "popular".
But if you want to use "right" to mean anything else, maybe to say something about it's technical merits independent of sociological factors like the network effect, first-mover advantage, high-profile early adopter, etc. then your sentence doesn't add any information.
Personally, I think Git's user experience is an unremitting shitshow, the kind of disaster that makes one reconsider Hanlon's Razor.
The technical capabilities buried under that UX are pretty nice, though you could probably discard 1/3 of them without impacting any noticeable fraction of users.
The performance is excellent and it's very easy for developers to underrate how much that effects user satisfaction.
And it had the good fortune to win on almost all of the sociological factors that largely determine product success.
When git became successful, there were scant few other options with a comparable feature-set regardless of speed.
Its distributed nature, ability to easily merge and rebase sets of changes, etc, were all wonderful solutions to real problems.
I'm unconvinced that its success was because it solved fewer problems than the state of the art, but rather that it solved more. This is a stark contrast to vgo which is intentionally solving fewer problems than other modern dependency management tools.
In addition, git must be performant enough to handle a git repo (namely the linux kernel, its original usecase). Beyond that, I think there's no evidence it intentionally cut features or complexity to be faster.
In the case of vgo, it cuts additional user-facing features in order to be faster, but there's 0 evidence that the speed matters, that there are any go projects in the world that cannot be solved quickly enough with an approximation of a sat solver.
They were glacially slow and difficult to use. But they had very roughly the feature set; in particular the distributed nature.
Git won almost entirely due to two factors.
1. The linux kernel used it so that brought some prestige.
2. Github made git hosting easy and free for a lot of people and had the cultural cachet to drive adoption.
Git has a very solid underpinning. But it's user interface and lack of guard rails has always made it painful. People endure the pain because if they don't they won't be able to use the tool that their industry has chosen. But some of us wish a different choice had been made in the dvcs arena.
I remember installing cogito to act as a front-end for git because very early on it seemed obvious that (a) git was going to win, and (b) it was going to win in spite of its UI, which was saying something.
The thing is, modern dependency management tools for development suck. They are complex and slow and terribly unreliable.
A fresh, unconventional approach is needed, and vgo may be it.
At the time, the choice of git wasn't that obvious. There were several popular, quite attractive contenders, including Mercurial, Monotone, Bazaar and GNU arch (and its forks), and it wasn't obvious who would win. But then Github arrived and changed everything, and it felt like everyone was suddenly caught up in a historic momentum whether they liked it or not.
We've had lots of those historic moments, some of them more slow-moving than others. Mac and NeXT being outmaneouvered by Windows; Lisp, Dylan and Smalltalk being relegated to the dustbin through the rise of more popular, worse languages; and so on. Not all of these developments are terrible (I love that Nginx prevailed over Apache and that Rails took over from Java app servers), but it's ridiculous how often the paperclip solutions win over the more thoughtful ones.
In a totally different domain with involves working diffs for and managing gigabytes of source code....