[HN Gopher] A Git story: Not so fun this time
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       A Git story: Not so fun this time
        
       Author : thunderbong
       Score  : 68 points
       Date   : 2024-07-01 19:10 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.brachiosoft.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.brachiosoft.com)
        
       | hoistbypetard wrote:
       | Thanks for sharing a fun read.
       | 
       | Bitkeeper was neat, and my overall take on it mirrors Larry
       | McVoy's: I wish he had open sourced it, made his nut running
       | something just like github but for Bitkeeper, and that it had
       | survived.
       | 
       | I only had one interaction with him. In the early '00s, I had
       | contributed a minor amount of code to TortoiseCVS. (Stuff like
       | improving the installer and adding a way to call a tool that
       | could provide a reasonable display for diffs of `.doc` and `.rtf`
       | files.) I had a new, very niche, piece of hardware that I was
       | excited about and wanted to add support for in the Linux kernel.
       | Having read the terms of his license agreement for Bitkeeper, and
       | intending to maintain my patches for TortoiseCVS, I sent him an
       | email asking if it was OK for me to use Bitkeeper anyway. He told
       | me that it did not look like I was in the business of version
       | control software (I wasn't!) and said to go ahead, but let him
       | know if that changed.
       | 
       | I use git all the time now, because thankfully, it's good enough
       | that I shouldn't spend any of my "innovation tokens" in this
       | domain. But I'd still rather have bitkeeper or mercurial or
       | fossil. I just can't justify the hit that being different would
       | impose on collaboration.
        
       | superfish wrote:
       | Great read!
       | 
       | I'm sure I'm not the first to point out that Junio (the appointed
       | git "shepherd") works at Google where mercurial is the "recommend
       | local vcs" internally instead of git.
        
       | mulmboy wrote:
       | > Additionally, Petr set up the first project homepage for Git,
       | git.or.cz, and a code hosting service, repo.or.cz. These websites
       | were the "official" Git sites until GitHub took over.
       | 
       | Is this true? I thought GitHub had no official affiliation with
       | the git project
        
         | jimbobthrowawy wrote:
         | I think some github employees have written code that went into
         | git, but it's not an _official_ affiliation.
         | 
         | The quotes on "official" imply non-official to me. i.e.
         | official seeming to people who don't know any better.
        
         | arp242 wrote:
         | That's why "official" in in quotes. As in: "de-facto standard".
        
         | roywashere wrote:
         | The git repo is on kernel.org nowadays with mirrors on
         | repo.or.cz and GitHub.
         | 
         | But I think they mean here what the official git project 'site'
         | is with docs and so on. And that is now https://git-scm.com/
         | and indeed as the article describes that was initially set up
         | by GitHub people, to promote git
        
       | xiwenc wrote:
       | It's been awhile since i actually finished reading an article
       | this long. Very well written!
       | 
       | I tried to find out who the author is or how come he/she knows so
       | much. No luck. Anyone else knows or OP care to chip in?
        
       | cryptonector wrote:
       | > In a 2022 survey by Stack Overflow, Git had a market share of
       | 94%, ...
       | 
       | > Never in history has a version control system dominated the
       | market like Git. What will be the next to replace Git? Many say
       | it might be related to AI, but no one can say for sure.
       | 
       | I doubt it's getting replaced. It's not just that it's got so
       | much of the market, but also that the market is so much larger
       | than back in the days of CVS.
       | 
       | It's hard to imagine everyone switching from Git. Switching from
       | GitHub, feasible. From Git? That's much harder.
        
         | jbaber wrote:
         | It does feel like asking "What will replace ASCII?" Extensions,
         | sure, but 0x41 is going to mean 'A' in 5050 AD.
        
       | cxr wrote:
       | There's a screenshot purporting to be of GitHub from May 2008.
       | There are tell-tale signs, though, that some or all of the CSS
       | has failed to load, and that that's not really what the site
       | would have looked like if you visited it at the time. Indeed, if
       | you check github.com in the Wayback Machine, you can see that its
       | earliest crawl was May 2008, and it failed to capture the
       | external style sheet, which results in a 404 when you try to load
       | that copy today. Probably best to just not include a screenshot
       | when that happens.
       | 
       | (Although it's especially silly in this case, though, since
       | accessing that copy[1] in the Wayback Machine reveals that the
       | GitHub website included screenshots of itself that look nothing
       | like the screenshot in this article.)
       | 
       | 1.
       | <https://web.archive.org/web/20080514210148/http://github.com...>
        
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       (page generated 2024-07-01 23:01 UTC)