Re: If bzr is less like using sharp pointy objects than git is [LWN.net]

Re: If bzr is less like using sharp pointy objects than git is

Posted May 8, 2015 6:15 UTC (Fri) by ldo (guest, #40946)
In reply to: Git + launchpad by roskegg
Parent article: Git code hosting beta (launchpadblog)

Seems unlikely at this stage. Git became popular entirely through its own merits, not because any big organization with any multi-billion-dollar budget was behind it (Microsoft Team Foundation Server, anybody?). Against all that deep-pocketed competition and insidious vendor lock-in, all those overwhelming odds stacked against it, Git has now reached the point that no other VCS, whether Free or proprietary, stands any hope of offering serious competition.

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Re: If bzr is less like using sharp pointy objects than git is

Posted May 8, 2015 12:44 UTC (Fri) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link] (2 responses)

> not because any big organization with any multi-billion-dollar budget was behind it

You mean like GitHub?

OK, replace "billion" with "million", but it's their sole business and I believe they are one of the biggest factors in git becoming the dominant VCS.

Back when GitHub got started, git, Mercurial and Bazaar were all quite close in mindshare and features. At one point it even seemed possible that Mercurial was winning due to many large projects adopting it (Python, Mozilla, OpenJDK, OpenOffice; Google Code added Mercurial support long before git; even kernel.org provided an official Mercurial mirror of the git repo).

But GitHub was the first website to offer such quick code hosting and convenient distributed workflows. People could just throw up some code and not worry about whether it's a "project" or not -- unlike "old school" FOSS hosting sites. And even though copycats like Bitbucket followed (Mercurial-only at first), network effects made sure that GitHub stays in the dominant position.

Re: If bzr is less like using sharp pointy objects than git is

Posted May 8, 2015 13:08 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Bitbucket has other problems (and always has). They support cloning over hg or git for all repos, but you can't make pull requests to any repo other than the one you forked directly (no cross-fork collaboration). They *still* lack 2FA support (they said they'd do it on Twitter a few years ago, but then nothing happened; their issue for it has no comments from Atlassian on any recent timescale). The web interface is a lot clunkier than GitHub. All emails for an issue share a Message-Id so MUAs which actually use it display the threads suboptimally. There are other things, but I can't think of them right now. Even if Bitbucket had come first, GitHub has been so much better at execution that I think they'd still have "won".

Honestly, GitLab is better than Bitbucket (though I replace all "hg clone" commands with "git clone hg::" because I just cannot grok Mercurial, so that difference doesn't mean much to me) in every way I've had to deal with either and you can host your own (and I haven't used the enterprise edition).

Re: You mean like GitHub?

Posted May 8, 2015 22:11 UTC (Fri) by ldo (guest, #40946) [Link]

Given the number of GitHub users who are clueless about Git, I don’t think many of them use it at all.

No, it was Git that made GitHub, not the other way round.