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Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it funny to think about how, if Tridge hadn't done what he did, if all of Linus' public shaming of Tridge had done the trick and the Linux kernel had stayed on Bitkeeper, that we wouldn't have had git, or Github?

Linus did a good job of coming up with a replacement tool in a hurry, but I'm also grateful to Tridge for poking a stick into the hornets' nest.

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I'd say we would have had Mercurial, but it was apparently developed for similar reasons:

> Mackall first announced Mercurial on 19 April 2005. The impetus for this was the announcement earlier that month by Bitmover that they were withdrawing the free version of BitKeeper. [Wikipedia]

Yes. I was subscribed to LKML around the time the Bitkeeper sage was in progress.

One thing that I do remember was just how arrogant Larry McVoy was about whether a replacement SCM could be developed and have feature parity with Bitkeeper. He kept on talking about how he/Bitkeeper is at least a decade ahead of the rest of the community and it would be very difficult to come up with an alternative.

Thankfully, the open source community proved him wrong!

Any particular threads worth digging up?

I ran into McVoy on reddit a few years ago. He seemed totally different than the "scary evil public persona" that has been bandied about...

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9zdlf/git_and_m...

...humble, concerned, and proud of how they've advanced the "state of the art" and his company's contributions to modern version control.

"""Imagine how I'd feel if Linus used BK for years and when moving off he made a centralized VCS."""

Well, to be fair to the people pushing the "scary evil public persona", I don't come across well in email. Never have.

I'm better in person; had a meeting with a guy from Germany a couple of years back who worked up the courage to invite himself to our offices in the south bay and after a couple of beers he made some comment like "wow, you're nothing like what I expected, you're actually a nice guy".

I get that a lot. It's a "gift" :)

Good to see you again! Hopefully business is still going well for you, although I imagine GitHub enterprise is becoming a strong competitor (and noticeably Git is left off the comparisons page?).

From what I can tell maybe age and experience have mellowed you out your email tone a bit... pretty soon you'll turn into Ned from The Simpsons. ;-)

Well, our website sucks eggs. I used to maintain it, then we hired a supposed sales/marketing guy and he stripped out all the screenshots and removed anything that actually gave you information and replaced it with a bunch of gobbly gook that is supposed to resonate with the fully buzz word enabled manager types. And then he left "to spend time with his family" :)

I've been too disgusted with the result to actually fix it but it clearly needs some lovin. I don't suppose anybody wants to tackle marketing BitKeeper? Not a fun job given that we annoyed the open source crowd but we do have some neat technology.

Github is in a different space, we don't see them much. We do see git of course, but lucky for us some of the design decisions in git left us some advantages (see the facebook thread about 6 months ago).

I dunno about Ned, isn't he the religious guy? I'm more the grumpy old man :)

We would still have had Darcs [1]. An without its competitors Git and Mercurial, maybe Darcs would have gotten more enthusiasts pushing Darcs to where Git is today.

[1] http://darcs.net/

Has Linus ever said why he disregarded Darcs and the other OSS options (wasn't Mercurial already starting to get somewhere at that time?).

Other projects not mature enough yet (and/or moving fast enough in that direction) and he wanted something now?

Or some technical points that he disagreed on, so wrote his own solution that worked the way he preferred instead of trying to change the established workings of other projects?

> wasn't Mercurial already starting to get somewhere at that time?

Git and Mercurial were started within days of one another, for the same reason (loss of BitKeeper license for the kernel devs).

Mercurial was actually announced 2 week after Git (2005-04-19 vs 2005-04-06)

At the time darcs had some serious problems - you could quite reliably get into a "merge of death" situation where the tool would just take ages (hours, days) to do a merge on a relatively small codebase. I don't actually know if that played into his thinking or if he just didn't trust a tool written in a language he wasn't as happy hacking in.

Has Linus ever said why he disregarded Darcs and the other OSS options (wasn't Mercurial already starting to get somewhere at that time?).

Here are Linus's comments about Darcs: http://markmail.org/message/vk3gf7ap5auxcxnb

As far as why not Mercurial, Mercurial was announced on April 19th. Git was announced on April 9th, and was self-hosting on April 7th. There were benchmarks comparing git and Mercurial shortly after Mercurial was announced, and git was faster, although at least originally it used much more disk space (this was before git had implemented compression and pack support).

> Has Linus ever said why he disregarded Darcs and the other OSS options (wasn't Mercurial already starting to get somewhere at that time?).

I think you might be thinking of Monotone here. Mercurial was started some days after git.

EDIT: Wikipedia has some info about what Linus thought of Monotone. The key problem with it was performance. I have no idea to what degree they have been fixed today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotone_%28software%29#Monoto...

You are probably right there, I think I have mixed up Monotone and Mercurial in my chronology.

Darcs was pretty neat at the time, especially since it was the only open DVCS. And the theory behind it was interesting to read.

The only problem is that it had a feeling of non-robustness when using it, and because of that I was tempted to have multiple copies of my repos, just in case of corruption. And that kinda defeats the purpose of VCS.

Then, git came along. Although a bit strange in the beginning, especially on windows, it felt robust enough from the start. And it supported multiple workflows. I know that, whatever stupid thing I do in my repo, git will never loose any data, and I'll be able to google an answer how to recover from my mistakes.

That being said, I'm glad darcs is still alive and kicking. Guys behind it are really smart, and who knows what new good ideas can come from it.

> Darcs was pretty neat at the time, especially since it was the only open DVCS.

You are forgetting Tom Lord's arch, which had a really bizarre interface (even more so than Darcs), but was conceptually very nice.

> You are forgetting Tom Lord's arch, which had a really bizarre interface (even more so than Darcs)

Darcs has a terrific consistent interface. Git has taken liberally from it. "git log -p" and "git add -p" are straight from darcs. AFAIK, nothing before darcs could look at a repo as a stream of diffs and comments.

There would also be Monotone which had its first release in 2003. So we would have at least two distributed version control systems.

I tried using darcs for awhile before I ever touched git. What made me initially switch was that darcs is non-trivial to install if you can't use a package manager (say because policy doesn't allow you to). After that, what really sold me on git was that git had much nicer integration with svn. I no longer use svn, but it was important at the jobs I had while I was getting started with dvcs in general.

I was not familiar with this story and had to look it up. Thanks for the pointer. Seems like the CEO of BitMover shot himself in the leg by being kind of unreasonable and triggering the development of various open source DVCSs, which surely are hurting his bottomline by now.

Clickable:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper

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