Iceberg is breaking new ground compared o Kraken/SourceTree etc.
Pharo took the risk of integrating git support in the tools.
It takes a few iterations.
So what? Either one is a user or one is inventing new stuff. When was it you wrote a full wrapper for libgit? And made it available to any app? Yes, any Pharo app now has the ability to use libgit features. Awesome and opening quite some doors.
Whoever designed the GUI also probably never used even git, or they couldn't stand their own tool. From the top of my head: 1) it shows all commits in a linear list (with broken unicode) completely ignoring branches 2) deletions are green and additions red.
All developers are users of someone else's software and knowledge. I'm OK with that, and happy to not reinvent perfectly good wheels. You go ahead and enjoy wrapping libgit.
My preference is to understand how to use data to help businesses. For example a decade ago I gave a tutorial on A/B testing which resulted in multiple companies adding many millions to their own bottom line.
It is a big world. There is room for all kinds.
Nobody forces one to use Pharo and I actually find it indeed useful to have an FFI binding to libgit.
Pharo has had git support for years with git filetree. There is no urgent need for a built in tool. Iceberg is an integrated tool which is not even yet released for the version of Pharo it is intended for (7).
The project is useful to test drive UFFI significantly. As such it is a really good test bed for all kinds 7of data structures and callbacks etc. Coupled with the 64 bit VM + image it is even more so.
I am in the Pharo ecosystem as a long play. Expedient solutions are plentiful. But they all lack this QWAN in Pharo that makes it enjoyable to me.
I am interested in understanding how things do work. Pharo allows me to do it in a way that suits me.
Given the count of "me" above, it is clear that I follow my own path and I couldn't care less about popularity.
Truth be told, I find it somewhat useful to have a harder to approach community. It keeps the signal to npise ratio at an acceptable level.
Yes, I'd like a cookie. But not for libgit, but libstrophe. It was easier (and clean!) to bind with Pharo than with a lot of other technologies. The ability to pin objects is also very usable.
Integrating with general tools may be a design goal. Yet it clearly isn't fully there. A filesystem based language does better without even trying.