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Comment by SonicSoul | Hacker News Reader

excuse my ignorance.. but it is interesting to me that we see blog posts about how to find different uses for git. what makes git so great that we (or people writing such articles) try to retrofit it into tools that already have more mature alternatives dedicated solely to doing that one thing really well. it's some form of marketing i don't fully understand.

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If you understand gits internal model, it's a content-addressable data store. This happens to lend itself well to version control, but the fact that it's used for version control is somewhat incidental. It would be good if there were some way of identifying the underlying data-structures as separate from the version control system.

You can call it libgit [0]

[0] http://libgit2.github.com/

I see your point, and its not a marketing imho.

In some cases i agree that there are mature alternatives, but what if you dont want or cannot use them. For e.g. Dropbox is a great file storage/sync service. But you may not be able to use it inside an enterprise and store office/confidential documents.

I think its essential to know and understand various ways in which a tool can be used. So that you can apply it to solve/simplify a problem. Its not a marketing.

Isn't this what 'hacking' is (at least partially) about?

Despite the existence of 'solutions', there are lots of interesting things people can do with git and it's probably fun to explore them.

edit: I'm not sure why you consider it 'marketing' either.

yep, i understand your point, and i do see the hacking angle. and i also see a bit of zealotism. I would be very curious to learn what benefits could be gained from hacking git to do something like a wiki (other than being able to say that you're using git for wiki). And i'm not cynical here, genuinely curious..

Well, you gain a bunch of features for free, like distributed storage, signed edits, etc. Also, I already know how to use Git, which saves me time over having to learn a whole new set of commands to use some other wiki software.

And frankly, is it really different from using someone else's library or module?

Yeah, even already knowing git isn't necessary. If you didn't learn git, you could learn it, and then you have the skills to use it for all sorts of stuff.

No specialized wiki software can be a DVCS or backup system.

The benefit i see by using git-backed wiki is that your data is not locked into any database/site. In the end they are plain text files and no dependency on database (e.g. myql), and no dependency on git-hosting site. If you dont like github, you can host your wiki else were.

doesn't that make your data less accessible/queryable?

Yes, in the end making a choice is about making a trade-off. If we need easy to query data storage then RDBMS are better.

I agree with the comment. Its hacking and not marketing!!

It's simply zealotism.

The right tool for the job is always the right tool for the job.

Git is not the right tool for the job for most of the cases described.

Its true that there is excitement behind writing the post.

But imho, right is a subjective word. What is right in one environment is not right in another. The intention of the post is to be aware of the possible uses of git. Its not to say that its best for all purpose/cases.

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