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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

I don't blame them but I do feel there's a certain irony at work. The same forces that lead us in the direction of a browser mono-culture also lead us towards a source control mono-culture!

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Is it bad that Git has become a defacto standard? I do think the saturation of GitHub is problematic (for obvious reasons) but at this point Git feels as generic to me as like, I dunno, DNS. Unless there's more going on that I'm not aware of, which is always possible!

is github still aggregating ~everything like it used to? I'm interested what effect the Microsoft had on overall adoption.

Personally, I enjoy that we rally around a common set of tools, as an industry. And Git is probably the best choice in its category. But that may have to do as much with adoption and network effect as it has with inherent quality. It's an advanced tool, but many folks struggle with the less common tasks, while many others struggle with even fairly basic things like a rebase. In an ideal world, if I imagine it, there'd be a tool like Git that lives at a different plane of usability. And I am unsure that a monoculture would be very encouraging in ever getting us there.

For a while, I was an absolutist on the git CLI. Recently though, I've been using fork for git. I've found that it is much easier to do rebases on it than the interactive mode. It's good to have something as powerful as git, and then build upon it to make it accessible to everyone.

> In an ideal world, if I imagine it, there'd be a tool like Git that lives at a different plane of usability

Isn't that exactly what Mercurial is trying to be?

Sure, but what's the point if the entire universe is pushing you toward Git. I understand that Mercurial has non-zero usage, just not anywhere where I ever worked.

It's a tool that's as powerful as you need it to be.

On my personal projects I basically just git add . , git commit . -m stuff , git push. Do that every 30 minutes and it's effectively a better Dropbox.

If I'm doing something more advanced I'll checkout a branch every now and then. The only time things get hard is when multiple people are editing the same file.

There are version control tools that are git compatible, like Sapling from Meta.

I think the likeliest future is that one or more of these catch on and Git is still around in the future but is not used directly by most people.

https://sapling-scm.com/docs/introduction/getting-started/

https://engineering.fb.com/2022/11/15/open-source/sapling-so...

Hit is not as good as mercurial for binary files afaik

There are some extensions like git-lfs, though I haven't used them much. I do wish it was easier to check out repos without getting ginormous .git directories sitting around - even a shallow checkout doesn't help if it's got currently existing giant files in there.

Well git was a tool built for bazaar style development. If you’re a closed group of trusted developers, I think fossil is a better solution. Fossil comes with issue tracker, forum, chat and perfect offline support for all of them, and is much much simpler to use than git. Git in general is just very confusing for new users.

Then there is also darcs as an alternative to git that has an innovative approach to patches that has advantages.

Personally I think we have GitHub monoculture in part because git on its own is insufficient. People in general don’t like the email flow (though personally I love it).

> Is it bad that Git has become a defacto standard?

It is a bit of meme/trope that Git's CLI can be a real challenge to use:

* https://xkcd.com/1597/

That's a very bike-shedding take. Just because something is better than its competitors does not make it a mono-culture. There's no "nefarious plot" behind git adoption any more than "Linux is causing a UNIX mono-culture"

Tangential, but I'm pretty sure bike-shedding is not the right term here.

> Just because something is better than its competitors does not make it a mono-culture.

"Because something is more popular than its competitors" I'd agree with.... but better, I'm not sold: better on what terms? Personally, I had found Mercurial more pleasant to work with and more aligned with my philosophy of change control. In some sense that's "better" from my perspective. Git I find to be a complex hodge-podge that requires monk-like dedication to come to terms with... in some sense that's definitely not better. I always recommend Git to clients. Not because I think it's better, but because I think it's popular enough that random developer-types are likely to have at least passing familiarity with it. Call it network effects. But attribution to "better" may be misplaced.

The best doesn’t always win. Sometimes good enough plus an early lead is all it takes.

Git did what it needed and through large exposure to open source developers via the kernel community it took off and nothing else ever caught it.

I like it myself. Others prefer HG or even SVN.

But unlike choosing a text editor, network effects are very important for source control. It doesn’t surprise me too much that the majority of people would centralize on the same tool.

Git is actually better than Mercurial, though they both have a lot of the same features. It's way faster and actually simpler than Mercurial. There are some rough edges for new users compared to Mercurial, but Git is still the better system.

I would rather they focus on their browser product.

Nobody have the energy working on multiple dying projects at once. (except google)

Firefox is Mozilla's browser product

I'm just happy that I can put the days of CVS, Subversion, and Perforce behind me.

While Git has its warts, it's firmly in "good enough" territory.

Eh. I thought Subversion was way easier to use (and thus better) than git, which is an absolute nightmare of complexity for people who don't need all the bells and whistles (which is most people). But so it goes, times change and all that.

Yeah subversion always worked fine in my experience and it was easy to understand.

I really don't get why people think git is uber-complicated for normal users.

I know: clone, pull, push, branch, checkout -b, merge, rebase -i. Those are my mainstays. The stash/stash pop stuff for a convenient power tool. And very occasionally, export to make a tarball.

It's so exceptionally rare for me to need anything else that I can't even think of anything else I've used offhand.

The first six are basic SCM, and IMO simpler to deal with than svn ever was. The rest... are conveniences that most don't need. Except rebase, debatably.

Rebase takes a short time to learn, but is well worth the trouble.

I've used a number of source control platforms over the years; git has been by far the easiest and most natural to work with for me. I've used it exclusively since around 2010ish, and have no regrets.

Amen.

On the other hand, I do miss things like $Id$...

I dunno… sometimes a tool is simply good and self-justifies why it’s broadly useful and used.

Get back to me when git wants to put ads in my commit messages.

you remind me that as bad as it gets, it could always get worse

The git server can echo whatever it wants down to the client (this is how Github put in those neat URLs to create a PR when you push a new branch) so this is very much already possible.

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