Well, there's also the "social and signaling effects" of using something that's non-git, that Eric S. Raymond articulates well: "we cannot afford to make or adhere to choices that further cast the project as crusty, insular, and backward-looking."
The "not a field" of Computer Programming, to appropriate Alan Kay's quip, is so broken that "social and signaling effects" swamp actual facts and information to a degree that makes it look like Astrology. I've been watching this for decades now -- literally.
Dynamic languages were for years after still tarred with being "slow" when both Moore's Law and progress in JIT VMs and generational GC had make them perfectly fine for tons of applications. If the half-life of patently false misinformation is literally about a decade, and what passes as fact between practitioners is less fact than school rumors, what does that say about our "field?"
There are tons of people who use and know git. It's fast, it works pretty well. There's some value in the fact that it's widely known and used (network effects), probably enough that whatever takes its place will probably be not just a bit better, but a lot better, in some way. bzr does not strike me, offhand, as being a lot better. Is fossil?
So in this case, I think that the network effects are an important fact.
I'm talking in general. I think it's good they're going to git.
bzr does not strike me, offhand, as being a lot better.
I never said it was better or worse. My comment is about the "field" and how accurate its "information" is in general. Sometimes social signalling and network effects are good. What disturbs me is that so many of us use this as a substitute for facts and objective analysis.
Taking social signalling and network effects into account is okay. Only going that far and stopping is just dim laziness. (It's also behind the worst examples of sexism and ageism in our "field.")
I think there's something to this. At a guess, people use a heuristic because facts and objective analysis are hard. I don't mean that sarcastically— I mean that it's difficult and complex even if you are not lazy. When people opt for what everyone else is using, they receive the benefits of treading a well-worn path. This isn't an excuse, but I am sympathetic. Some people are just trying to get work done.
On the other hand, that is a poor justification for being too lazy to do the job right. Often a problem isn't as hard or complex as it looks, and you might just learn something while looking into it. You get the idea.
Also, +1 to your comment re: sexism and ageism.