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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

I think it is odd that the story mentions git at all. Git5, the mentioned wrapper around piper, has only a niche audience when I last used it 5 years ago, and it was a demonstrated fact that the users of it were less productive than perforce users. Whether that was causal or not was unknown.

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Hi, I'm the Han-Wen from the title.

The story mentions git because git5 got me into developer tooling. More in particular, it put me in touch with Shawn Pearce who ran the Git/Gerrit team at Google. When I went to work for him, Shawn wanted to have codesearch support in Gerrit, and Zoekt was ultimately the outcome of my explorations in this space.

IIRC, Git5 was deleted approximately 5 years ago because Fig (the Hg based replacement) had taken over all the use cases

Is Fig still kicking? I worked on it a bit as an intern back in 2014, but Mercurial has also been on its way out of mainstream support over the last few years. It was a really neat project!

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx_LGilOuE4. I think the plan is to replace to it with something based off JJ.

I agree there doesn't seem to be a good connection between work on version control and work on code search.

However, I don't think it makes sense to downplay git5. Anecdotally, basically everybody knew about it, and I'd constantly run into people using it (which is by itself noteworthy since nobody was exactly talking about version control all the time).

Git5 was at the time the most robust solution to chain commits, which was tedious bordering on impossible without some tool. Without definitive data, I wouldn't say users were less productive with git5: it definitely was a useful tool that people at least recommended for chain commits. I was definitely more productive with it.

There were a lot of footguns though, and I do think the hg wrapper that superseded it was way better.

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