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Comment by itohihiyt | Hacker News Reader

Came here for a martial arts tutorial, which I thought was a bit weird to see front page on HN, and now I see an alternative to git.

I don't particularly like git and for personal projects use fossil instead.

Without going through the whole tutorial, and doing a lot more reading, why should I consider using this over fossil?

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Interesting. I'm not a professional developer and also love fossil for toy/hobby projects. I find it fascinating that this well crafted, solid piece of software is so forgotten, and that git has just rolled over everything.

Same here, the fact that it includes bug tracker, web UI and wiki/docs is a huge plus.

Honestly you could sell me the best alternative to Git that exists and I still wouldn’t switch, or even try it. I don’t care enough about my versioning system to use something else than what everybody uses. Ubiquity beats convenience.

What I care about is the tooling around it: GitHub and its ecosystem mainly. I also want my open source projects to be on GitHub specifically, and I don’t want to ask contributors to use something other than Git.

Totally respect you wanting to not care about tools, but for the latter part, I do agree with you, which is why I like jj: it uses a git repo as its backing store, so your projects can live on GitHub and all the rest of your collaborators can use git. Nobody else needs to know or care.

Wow I’ve heard about jj multiple times before but didn’t realize it was compatible with Git. You got me interested in just 1 sentence, nicely done!

Well, guess I’m on my way to read the tutorial.

Glad to hear it! It’s a killer feature, for sure.

Yeah, I was also wondering 'Traditional JJ or BJJ?'

I've never really messed around with VCSes other than git and Subversion, there's people who really like Mercurial though, so I wonder how jj compares to that.

Same. I miss the old times when people tried naming their projects sensibly. I mean, we're constantly telling ourselves how variable and function names should speak for themselves, but then we name our projects using random, completely non-descript names. It's a annoying.

Which old times are you referring to / what are "sensible" names?

I thought about it and I don't know what a better name would be. Off the top of my Head, I know Perforce, BitWarden, Subversion, fossil and git. And then the abbreviations CVS, RCS and SVN.

Do any of these qualify as a descriptive name?

As a British national I like to think git is a very descriptive name, because git is a git to use and understand.

For a US southerner it works too. We can use the tool to 'git' our code.

I don't just mean version control systems, but since you mentioned them: CVS (concurrent version system), rcs (revision control system) and subversion all seem fairly descriptive to me?

At one point in my career, I used Microsoft SourceSafe, which is a pretty descriptive name. Seems like the exception here, though.

You probably mean BitKeeper. BitWarden is a password / secrets manager.

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