Emacs moving to Git

Posted Jan 9, 2014 21:27 UTC (Thu) by mattrose (guest, #19610)
Parent article: Emacs moving to Git

> One hopes not, as there should be room for more than one open-source DVCS.

When has there ever been more than one VCS in the Open Source World? From SCCS, to RCS, to CVS, to subversion, to git, there has always been just one dominant version control system. It hasn't really slowed us down yet.

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Emacs moving to Git

Posted Jan 16, 2014 14:55 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

I'm not so sure about that: when CVS was the dominant system, how many people used things like branches or even didn't hide in the corner when the use of branches was suggested? When the Linux kernel had to abandon BitKeeper - the dominant system in its own special ecosystem - the resulting development and proliferation of alternatives made for a healthy progression of techniques and practices around source code management.

On almost every occasion where some system is picked as being the chosen one, with everybody else getting shouted down for even thinking of using something else, the effect is typically that of stagnation: people accept the limitations of the chosen tools and even start to apologise for them (so it is that when people complain about Git's usability, you have the absurd retort that "it's really a powerful versioned filesystem and object database rolled into one - feel the power!") instead of considering that things could be even better than they are and that maybe some of the choices made when designing that chosen system might have been wrong or at least not optimal.