schacon

Yeah, I didn't do aliases on purpose, because I wanted everything to be fairly global, where I feel like aliases are more personal. But yes, aliases are great.

GitButler's amazing designer is Pavel: https://bsky.app/profile/pavellaptev.bsky.social

Of course, you can also try GitButler (https://gitbutler.com), it's a pretty nice GUI :)

At the end of the article, I also subtly plugged:

* https://github.com/so-fancy/diff-so-fancy

* https://github.com/dandavison/delta

Also both great TUI diff tools

I did almost put `log.date iso` in there, I like that one too.

Good point.

I mentioned it in the post as well, but Git will look in `.config/git/ignore` if you prefer to just use that rather than setting a new path.

There's also a possible downside here in having things hidden for you but not for others since it's not in your `.gitignore` project file.

I'm honestly kind of on the fence about this one, I don't have much in that file for those reasons.

Curious what I might have missed that you all put in your `~/.gitconfig`

I understand, I meant I tried to say the word “decisecond” out loud and we debated if that was a real word or if I was attempting to say “deca” which was understandable.

I can’t help but feel like you’re calling me “old”…

I feel like in the "racing / git crossover" world, that's pretty close. :)

I'm curious if the startup time, plus the overhead of Git trying to figure out what you might have meant is significant enough to give you enough time to realize and hit ctrl+c. In testing it quickly, it looks like typing the wrong command and having it spit out the possible matches without running it takes 0.01-0.03s, so I would venture to guess that it's still not enough time between hitting enter and then immediately hitting ctrl-c, but maybe you're very very fast?

We had this debate internally at GitButler. Deci versus deca (and now deka, which appears to also be a legit spelling). My assumption was that 1 full second may have felt too long, but who really knows.

Not sure, but I do personally know two high profile Ruby developers who regularly race in the LMP2 (Le Mans Prototype 2) class - DHH and my fellow GitHub cofounder PJ Hyett, who is now a professional driver, owning and racing for AO (https://aoracing.com/).

I mostly say this because I find it somewhat fun that they have raced _each other_ at Le Mans last year, but also because I've personally seen both of them type Git commands, so I know it's true.

I don't particularly want to engage, but why not?

* Co-Pilot is trained on copyrighted code without attribution: ludicrous?

This is debatable, but yes, it's a ridiculous reason to not use github. If your code is on the internet, which it is with every other alternative host they mention, it will be crawled and used for training, just as it will be read by humans and learned from. We can have a fair use debate, but GitHub is not alone in this stance or problem set.

* Github works with ICE: incoherent?

No, I would file this under ridiculous. GitHub is a government contractor. It licenses it's software to lots of organizations. People can disagree with a lot of them, but trying to manage that and dictate changing political morality at a company level is insane. All of these other solutions are certainly used by organizations that are a lot more controversial than a major federal institution, as much as I may even personally disagree with policies under certain administrations. But again, singling out GitHub is just finding some reason to be mad, it's not GitHub specific.

* All of Github's hosting code is proprietary and secret: ridiculous?

The computers that you're writing your FOSS code on, that indeed they wrote this article on, have proprietary chips, have software you can't access. You think everyone at SFC uses a Stallman-esque laptop? They're probably happily typing away on their Macbooks, full of non-FOSS software. The software community is an ecosystem of lots of models, nobody is all-FOSS, it's not possible. GitHub has open sourced Electron, libgit2, a thousand other things. Core code was never helpful to anyone and would not be helpful today. Git isn't a lock-in proprietary thing, you can always easily transfer your code elsewhere.

* Github tries to discredit copyleft: hyperbolic?

It doesn't try to discredit copyleft as a corporate stance. Several individuals have pointed out weaknesses in copyleft vs permissive OSS licenses. But it's never that you should use closed instead of copyleft or something, it's always something like if you're using copyleft, it's generally better for the community to use MIT or Apache or something more permissive that doesn't need to involve lawyers and gives you more freedom.

* Github is wholly owned by Microsoft who also doesn't like copyleft: conjecture?

This is a 30 year old take on what Microsoft cares about. Microsoft probably never thinks about copyleft these days, any more than the rest of us do. MS contributes to Linux, contributes to Git, both GPL projects. Almost certainly they contribute more to GPL projects globally than you or I or the SFC do.

> As to SFC not having anything better to do... this is exactly what their mandate says they should do

My point was that they can actually help the Git project by sponsoring meetings, educating people in a useful way, etc. I have helped donate a fair amount to the SFC through GitHub events and was hoping the money would be better spent on actual community building and project fostering rather than cheap think-pieces like this.

They actually did so very early.

In early 2009 they added Git, Hg and Bzr support: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/03/sourc...

That's less than a year after GitHub launched and was still very small.

That was certainly one of our internal arguments, that the institutional investment would be helpful for large company trust.

That's interesting. I know BK had "pulls", but iirc it didn't have a "request-pull" command, so clearly the "pull" terminology came from BK and the "request" part came from how people talked about it in email.

I actually just shot a video showing how BitKeeper was used. I'll post that and a blog post on our GitButler blog soon.

I'm curious how you come to this conclusion. GitHub has always had fairly insane hosting problem sets. When someone clones the Linux repo, that's like 5G in one go. The full clone issues and the problems of a few edge case repos create sometimes crazy hosting costs and scaling problems. Most centralized systems only have to deal with one working tree or one delta at a time. There is not much that goes over the wire in centralized systems in general, comparatively.

I would argue that GitHub already won in 2012. The investment helped us grow in a different way, but I don't think anyone involved in that deal would have said that we had almost any serious competitive threats at the time, which is to some degree why it was such a great deal.

It all depends on how you're counting. For one, "open source" was not a phrase before 1998, so there is some retrofitting of Free Software projects. But also, there isn't a registry, it's rather difficult to be more than approximate with this. The article is very specific about their methodology, I'm only using one graph as a general example.

What is the point you're trying to make here?

Which is ironic, because that entire article is hyperbolic conjecture.

I think PR and network effects of GitHub definitely played a role in the success of Git over other options like bzr, but you should also remember that bzr had tons of issues. It was slower, there was no index/staging area, there was no rebasing, etc. Mercurial was very good too, but while there were pluses and minuses with all of them, I think there was a _lot_ of careful comparison too. None of them were clearly and in all aspects better than the others.

There was concern actually. We debated a bit the concept of naming the company "GitHub", since "git" is baked into the company name. We worried a little about what happens when the next big VCS thing comes along, not knowing that it's going to be dominant for at least the next 20 years.

I do go into Linux and Linus in the article in some depth, but even Linus credits the Ruby community to a degree with the explosion in popularity of Git, which is fairly clearly due in large part to GitHub. But, it's certainly a chicken/egg question.

I would also argue that MS is nothing like the company that it was 30 years ago when that philosophy was a thing. The truth today is the via GitHub, Microsoft hosts the vast majority of the world's open source software, entirely for free.

Git's been around for almost 20 years now. I would say fairly dominant for 15 or so.

Fun fact, I (original author), wrote the original version of Gist. That was my first project at GitHub. Gist #1 is my claim to fame: https://gist.github.com/schacon/1

Sorry, "we" is GitHub. I'm the author of the article and one of the GH cofounders.

I would argue that SF was always pretty shitty, because it focused entirely on advertising. I remember Chris giving a talk comparing the signup process of GitHub and SourceForge. SF had like 8 fields and GitHub had 2. This was because SF wanted to know ad demographic info - where did you hear about us, etc. GitHub just wanted a name and a password. But this was the difference in everything - SF cared about advertisers, not developers. GitHub never thought about what anyone other than the developers using the product wanted.