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Let's be honest about Git

6 points by keithalewis ↗ HN
Linus is a smart guy, but he is not reknown for being people friendly, by his own admission.

Let's start with some facts. Linus decided to write his own version control system because the people who wrote free software he thought was good enough for his purposes decided to start charging users money for the fruits of their labor.

By his own account, he spent a couple of weeks writing git and named it after himself.

Moving into WAG territory, the original GitHub team thought since Linus wrote it there's got to be a pony in there somewhere. Evidently many other people did too. Eventually adults stepped in to monetize that and some of the original team got butthurt. The adults eventually made a pile selling out to M$ who recognized the operation is not about source code control, at all.

Git is very user unfriendly. It may solve Linus' problems, but it has caused a lot of pain when I expected it to solve mine.

8 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 31.8 ms ] thread
mikece
It would be better, in my opinion, if instead of having a single implementation of a source control app there should be a specification not just for the source control itself but for SaaS products for collaborative development around that source control model (the latter wasn't obvious until GitHub built it though).
iab
What did you expect of it, that it didn’t do? Or did poorly?
mindcrime
Great, so use Mercurial, or Bazaar, or Subversion, or CVS, or RCS, or Visual Sourcesafe, or Perforce, or <gasp> Rational Clearcase.
JanisL
Distributed version control intrinsically has difficult concepts, I find a lot of people who claim these things to be user unfriendly are struggling with the concepts of distributed version control. If you struggle with these concepts all the DVCS systems will be hard to use. While there's some rough edges with Git it's worth noting that at the time it was created most of the alternatives were significantly worse to use.
1vuio0pswjnm7
"The adults eventualy made a pile selling out to M$ who recognized the operation is not about source code control, at all."

It is about __________

I could fill that in but I want to know what the OP thinks, or what readers think.

keithalewis
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