The Rise of Git

snydeq writes "InfoWorld takes a look at the rise of Git, the use of which has increased sixfold in the past three years. Buoyed in large part by interest among the Ruby community and younger developers, Git has been gaining share for open source development largely because of its distributed architecture, analysts note. And the version control system stands to gain further traction on Subversion in the years ahead, as Eclipse is making Git its preferred version control system, a move inspired by developers and members."

Comments

Re:Mercurial

[MemoryDragon]

Mercurial is not really superior, it is a subset of about 80% of hits functionality baked into a nicer command line set. Btw. Mercurials strong side is really the relatively clean command line outside of that both systems are so close it is eery.

Git could use revision numbers

[euroq]

Since the idea behind Git is that since it is distributed, and doesn't need a master repository, I guess it didn't make sense to have revision numbers when it was created (for the Linux kernel). This is because when two people make separate revisions at the same time on their local repositories, a linear revision number would conflict.

However, I've never actually used any Git project/repository which didn't have a master repository. This is both local repositories for my own projects on my Dropbox folder, and professional repositories I've used (Android and the various repositories at the company I work at), And especially at work, it has been annoying that we didn't have revision numbers.

I wish Git would get a new feature added: the ability to assign a repository as the "master" repository, and in turn the ability for the master repository to assign revision numbers. If people are wondering how that would work considering people make commits on their local repository and then push them to the master causing possible conflicts, the revision numbers wouldn't get assigned until they hit the master branch and they also split it up for merges:
      5
      / \
4.1 4.2
    \ /
      3
(or something similar to the above)

Lots of people who use an alternative VCS like Mercurial, Bazaar, etc., bitch about Git because the lack of revision numbers. To those who are unfamiliar, each commit in Git has a SHA1 hash which is used as an identifier instead of a revision numbers. Unfortunately, they are very unwieldy to communicate to others. At work we always use the name and date-time instead, but that has problems as it doesn't convey the branch for instances when it matters.

Re:Git could use revision numbers

[minkie]

Revision numbers are easier for humans to deal with. For example, here's a common flow I use every day:

$ hg pull
$ hg log | less { see some change I'm curious about and note the change number }
$ hg export 3742 | less

With change numbers, it's easy to remember 4 (or even 5) digits for the time it takes to type the export command. If I only had hashes, I'd have to copy-paste the string. Things like this matter less to people who only use GUIs. For command line folks, however, being able to easily read, pronounce, remember, and type change numbers is essential. Even if you're just talking with other people, it's a lot easier to say, "Oh, I see what happened, in change 2456, you did..." than to refer to hash strings.

I've used rcs, cvs, clearcase, perforce, dabbled in svn, dabbled in git, and am currently using hg. Of the centralized bunch, perforce is my favorite (not free, but reasonably priced and amazingly excellent tech support). I can't see anybody wanting to use svn for any new projects today. When it first came out, it was a a significant improvement over cvs and people naturally flocked to it, but there's just so many better alternatives today.

Clearcase is an interesting beast. For sure, it's overpriced bloatware that's on life support, being kept alive mostly by big legacy customers with neanderthalic IT and Release Engineering departments who still believe IBM can do no wrong. But, it did have some interesting ideas. That every revision of every file exists simultaneously in the file system namespace is really powerful.

Between git and hg, I'd say they are fundamentally identical in capability, but I find the hg command set easier to get my head around. All the people who say, "X is the best possible vcs. I used to use cvs and when I switched to X my sex life improved overnight", fail to understand that "X is way better than cvs" is true for pretty much any value of X, and says nothing about the relative merits of the various X instances.

Re:Tower, GitHub, GitX client (Some Mac only)

[syzler]

Let's not forget that Xcode 4 uses Git by default and is tightly integrated into the interface. Examples being

• * Xcode creates a git repository by default when creating a new project
• * When saving a file, Xcode will place a "M" marker next to a file to indicate it needs to be committed
• * Re-naming a file in Xcode will perform the rm and add operations automatically in Git
• * Xcode allows you to view the current version and past versions side by side in the editor

PostgreSQL CVS-git conversion

[greg1104]

I had a small role in getting the PostgreSQL project to convert from CVS to git. There's a good summary of what happened at Lessons from PostgreSQL's Git transition. With a pretty conservative development community, the bar for converting from CVS to git was set pretty high: the entire CVS repository had to come through, such that every single release ever tagged could be checked out and get exactly the same files as checking it out of CVS (a little binary diff tool was used to confirm). With around 15 years of history in there, that took some upstream fixes to the cvs2git tool to finally accomplish; it took just over a year to work out all the details to everyone's satisfaction. My checked out copy of the current repo is 272MB right now, so neither small nor giant.

I would say that everyone who works regularly on the code is at least a little bit more productive than they used to be, with the older CVS experts having seen the least such improvement. But some people are a whole lot more productive. I'd put myself in that category--my patch contribution rate is way up now that it's so much easier to pop out a branch to hack on some small thing and then submit the result for review.

And the conversion seems to have improved the uptake of new developers getting involved in working on the code. Having to deal with CVS was a major drag for younger developers in particular, and Subversion is equally foreign to most of them now. As suggested in the article, anyone under 25 will only touch a corporate style CVS or Subversion repo if dragged kicking and screaming into it. As more of that generation rises through IT, old style repos will continue to get shredded at a good rate every year. It could have been any of the DVCS systems that ended up in this position, but git was the one that got the right balance of feature, innovation rate, and publicity. Now that it's got such a wide user base, too, I don't see any of the other VCS software options competing with it successfully in the near future.

Re:Bazaar

[euroq]

Your cite branches in separate folders as a superior feature? Subversion has that crap and it's messy.

High five brah! I hated that shit when I had to use SVN.

You also mention "revision numbers" as a feature. Who gives a crap about revision numbers?

As a person who has professionally used Git (and likes it) in many repositories, both large and small, I miss revision numbers. When I e-mail my colleagues about commits (i.e. revisions in another syntax), it is annoying to communicate it: I have to copy and paste the entire commit metadata (name, author, date-time, and SHA) in order to reflect it properly. I would much rather say "15.1" or "newfeaturebranch.3".

It also has been a problem when using the "Blame..." tool to track down why something was changed, as you have to do a double-lookup to find the SHA of the changed line and then the commit of the SHA. Well, my bad because really you'd have to do the same thing with a revision number, but trust me... I'd rather be working with revision numbers than SHAs because it would be easy to know that this line was changed because of "newfeaturebranch" rather than e93f02a09f9fe092a039a923.

Obviously, we don't need revision numbers... but boy would I love to have them.