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0 pointsNursie4d ago0 comments

There are those of us who remember the before-times, who I think are in general just happy we have git.

Having lived through sccs, pvcs, SourceSafe, Clearcase and svn (among others), the introduction of lightweight, sane branching, merging, rebasing etc was a revelation.

Yes, there are still things that an adept could do with some of those other systems that git doesn't make easy. For example we have the holy war between those who demand a git repo has a clean history vs those who would rather a revision control system actually stores revision history and forms a record of what really happened. In Rational ClearCase you would use a different config specification depending on your task to programatically select visibility, and hey presto, you have both views available.

(Not that I would wish ClearCase on my worst enemy these days, those config specs were a language in themselves and the amount of times people would get in trouble with them was a real drag, and that's only one of the myriad downsides.)

Then git came along and did away with so much of that complexity that I imagine there are legions of us who think it's good enough (TM) that version control is more or less a solved problem and nothing irks us enough to seek out alternatives.

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philwelch3d ago

I can definitely relate to that, and I'm actually quite fond of git myself. I just never expected that people would stop trying to make a better version control system. That's not entirely fair, a lot of work has been invested in Pijul and Fossil, but I would have expected much more interest in alternatives. I remember all of the reasons Git was so new and exciting at the time, but now it feels like we're all locked into it, not out of any deliberate attempt at vendor lockin but out of complacency, and because fewer and fewer of us still remember a time that it felt possible to invent a better version control system.

NursieOP3d ago

It's definitely ruined one of my favourite interview questions. I used to ask candidates what their preferred source control system was and why.

I wanted them to demonstrate that they'd thought about it and had some insight rather than give a specific answer. But now it's just "... uh, git, I've only really used git", and you can't blame anyone for that because it's so dominant now. I've updated my question to be about branching strategies but I'm just not as fond of it.

Well, you've inspired me to have a look more into the competition. I don't think git is perfect, I think it's just good enough and it'll take quite a lot to shift people over to something else now we have the whole github network effect. But hey, no harm in looking around :)

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