Microsoft Embraces Git For Development Tools

alphadogg writes "Once vehemently opposed to open-source software, Microsoft has warmed to the development model over the years and will now take the unusual step of incorporating an open-source program developed by Linus Torvalds into its own development tools. Microsoft is integrating the widely used Git, a distributed revision control and source code management system, into its Visual Studio IDE and Team Foundation Server, two of the company's main tools for enterprise developers."

Comments

Re:1st step.

[Anonymous Coward]

VSS != TFS. Might be time to catch up with 5 years ago. And yes TFS can scale.

GPL Breaks this process.

[anwyn]

The GPL restricts the "Extend" step so that Discontinue step is impossible.

Any derived work of something, like git, which is GPLed, must be GPLed. That means that if you fork, the main branch, the main branch is free to use your extensions. This makes it difficult for replacement to work.

Furthermore, if you try discontinue step, others are free to fork and continue. So discontinue does not work.

The GPL completely breaks the "Embrace. Step 2: Extend. Step 3: Replace. Step 4: Discontinue." process. Which is why it is hated.

Re:1st step.

[slimjim8094]

Why do you think garbage collection is related to "keeping track of what was done by who, when"? All it does is clean up files that are no longer part of the commit tree; that is, unreachable and "garbage". A way to create such a file is to 'git add' a file (which puts that specific version in the repo, for later commit) and then make another change. Since it's a different file than it was, you have to re-'git add' it, which creates an entirely new object that is referenced by the eventual commit. Hence, the dangling useless object is garbage and should be cleaned up.

People have been complaining about rebasing for a long time, and there's some valid criticism of it, but given the above I'm not convinced your problems with it are properly understood.