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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

> Luckily we already have a distributed version control system that can take over github

Surprised that this wasn't just a link to Git. The biggest benefit of Git over predecessors was that it enabled decentralization. Github re-centralized the common case for the sake of convenience.

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Yes but on Earth every project needs a canonical main branch. Most also need a way to manage and review changes to that branch that all project members have direct access to.

Gitea (and its popular fork, Forgejo) are very lightweight. You can easily stand up an instance on a cheap VPS.

Agreed. Just moved some of my projects to codefloe.com (Forgejo) this weekend. FYI - it provides a lot more than a link to git.

It's on the project to decide which is canonical and export a read only accessible version. Change review only requires a communication medium (the patches are mostly plain text) and that can be done in a lot of way. As for merging those changes, it's an organizational issue.

If it’s on the project to determine their requirements, why are you doing it?

Github and other providers before proved that git itself is just a small part of managing code, there's a lot more needed for a full workflow, and it's meaningful for it all to be tightly coupled.

The biggest benefits of Git over predecessors were branching, 3-way merge, and history rewrites (in particular, rebase and squash). As much as Git fans wanted decentralization to be a major selling point, decentralization has never been a major selling point.

Not exactly decentralization but distribution was the main selling point.

In comparison to SVN and other non-DVCs git did not need to continuously talk to the central server for history, "branch" creations, unlocking/locking files before changes, etc.

Linus wanted a DVCS, but they wanted centralization and licenses were expensive, so he decided to launch the git initiative where he provided scaffolding and the rest came from contributions.

It was a selling point. Maybe even intended selling point. But it absolutely isn't the main selling point. Never was, never will. The big thing, the reason people ever started talking about Git outside Linux dev team, has always been branches. It's branches, not distribution, that made every SVN user in the world abandon it in exchange for Git. Saying distribution has been more important than branching is like saying automobiles replaced horses because of smell. Which, admittedly, was a big problem with horses, but come on.

It seems our experiences are different.

Back then, when working with SVN, we had sites in various countries, with under provisioned VPNs between them. Loading up a single file history could take 15 minutes. I am not joking. Every single operation took ages, so really, any DVCS would have won in that situation, regardless of its approach to branches.

If the SVN server would sit in the same building then I guess the branching would have been the main selling point, but it was not the main selling point for us in that situation.

I think you understate what a big deal the decentralization was when Git came out. Back in the early 2000s, getting internet while out of the office was hard. 3G was in its infancy and expensive so you were at the mercy of finding a WiFi hotspot. Git's predecessors, such as SVN, were unusable without an internet connection to the server. Git (and Mercurial) allowed doing version control without an internet connection for the first time, which is a massive benefit for some types of development or doing work on the road. This aspect of Git definitely became less important as always-on internet connections became ubiquitous, but it's still super helpful sometimes. I can't imagine going back.

I think you understate what a big deal branching was when Git came out. Back in the early 2000s, branching was hard. Git's predecessors, such as SVN, didn't have branching at all until much later, and even then the implementation was riddled with problems and quite often the repo entered state where branches cannot merge back to main (which was called trunk back then).

No matter how beneficial the ability to work offline was, branching was still far more important. It's a completely different order of magnitude. Git without offline capabilities would still be a massive success. Git without branching would not.

> "Crypto had attracted grifters from the beginning, even though its most respected figures were more interested in changing the world. As Silicon Valley investors piled in after them, they wanted to fund companies that would become essential to the crypto economy, allowing them to make vast amounts of money. Entrepreneur after entrepreneur discovered that the best way to turn a profit in a decentralized economy was to figure out ways to centralize parts of it again." (Henry Farrell, Underground Empire)

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