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Comment by jw14 | Hacker News Reader

No. Git did not prove that Linus could more more than a one-hit wonder. It proved halo effect is real.

Mercurial had a better interface and early on was equal or better (as far as I know) for most things. Everyone went with Git because Linus made it. I think it also might have been faster for huge code bases... but that pretty much only affects the kernel team and a handful of others. Your standard CRUD app could easily use a slower VCS without noticing.

Instead of going on merits, everyone just followed Linus. Which is what always happens in technology communities. Everyone just does whatever some guy at the front is doing.

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I was there when the winner was still unclear and this is complete nonsense. Very few people even knew git was from Torvalds.

Git started winning people over because mercurial was atrociously slow. The real nail in the coffin was GitHub which truly was revolutionary. Nothing else really played a part.

Thanks for the insight. I never found Mercurial slow for anything I needed to do. So honestly I didn't recall. (update: I had an impression it was, since I remember reading the kernel team needed something fast, but I never 'felt' the slowness)

What do you mean by "there"?

If you mean you've been working that long my first VCS experience was with MS SourceSafe and quickly moving to CVS. So...

The first I heard of Git (as best I recall) I definitely knew it was from Linus.

I don't remember it this way at all. Git always had the halo of the tool kernel devs use, written by Linus himself. There was no escaping this.

Mercurial slowness was never a problem for me, and these were the times before SSD! It probably was slower but I used it on some pretty large codebases (NetBeans) and it was fine.

BitBucket was much better for me than GitHub because it offered free private repositories with 5 users, which just happens to be enough for a small team/company/startup.

Sun Microsystems picked Mercurial for OpenJDK/NetBeans/etc, Mozilla was on Mercurial.

I'm still puzzled how Git won because in my bubble it was a tool with much worse commands and 'metaphors' compared to Mercurial.

I think it's a big loss for the industry that we are all (me included) on git.

> The real nail in the coffin was GitHub which truly was revolutionary.

How much earlier was Github than Bitbucket?

Bitbucket supported both Git and Hg.

I think the quality of GitHub compared to other code hosting systems is probably why git is so popular. Mercurial is still used in plenty of places (eg Mozilla, Facebook). And integrating with GitHub/other things which are integrated with GitHub seems like a major factor which convinced open source projects to start with/switch to git.

That's a good point. Although Mercurial had Bitbucket.

Was GitHub that much better? Or was it network effect of everyone on GitHub? (sincere question, I don't know)

As much as I agree with how terrible the interface of git is, the internals of git are very good.

I was a mercurial user and eventually changed to git.

I think from the perspective of a repository maintainer git was always the better choice. And those are the ones who choose the VCS. For most devs, that just want to commit, mercurial had the friendlier user interface. But I am glad git won, because now as a developer I use a lot of it's functionality that I never expected from an VCS.

> Instead of going on merits, everyone just followed Linus.

You don't think creating Linux and git are "merits"? Most people I know that adopted git had no clue who Linus was, or that he was even involved in git.

Creating both are merits, of course.

But creating Linux should not be a merit toward Git. Obviously the experience would make Git better. But why did a better UI lose to an inferior one?

I'd love to be wrong because now Mercurial is sort of dead and I have to use Git every day if I want to work with others. I'd love to have a better attitude about it. So far it just looks like another thing that one because X popular guy made it or Y big company made it.

> But why did a better UI lose to an inferior one?

Because it wasn't better? Git won because it's overall a superior VCS, had better support for complex workflows, was performant, and had GitHub which means teams could circumvent IT.

Git won because anyone that wanted to contribute to Linux had to use it.

That's ridiculous. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the number of other developers and projects out there.

That's not true at all. All you need ist a diff tool and an email address.

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