Indeed I was, and FWIW I distinctly remember everyone throwing their weight behind Mercurial, in large part for its superior cross-platform support.
I stand by my position. git usage would be minor without GitHub. GitHub could switch off git if they wanted to and they'd take most of the git user base with them.
It's sad, because there are other useful work flows, but GitHub is SCM at this point. I agree with what someone said elsewhere, they could swap out git for bitkeeper and nobody would care (well the people that are still butthurt over the licensing would whine but it's apache v2 now, that should be good enough).
I'm sorry, what dev conferences are you going to? You're kind of just claiming that these same people are too stupid to understand what git allows you to do out of the box so they wouldn't mind BitKeeper's (or any other SCM like it) problems and limitations as long as GitHub hosted it for them with a nice logo (which again, isn't true because other hosted SCM's solutions lost as well). That's just incredibly tone deaf and doesn't make sense from a historical timeline perspective. This is just straight up denial at this point.
>well the people that are still butthurt over the licensing would whine but it's apache v2 now, that should be good enough
It's not just a licensing issue and you know it. You are being dishonest with everyone here and yourself. There is a historical record in the lkml archives that you're choosing to ignore.
Except for nearly every single open source project.
>Mercurial, in large part for its superior cross-platform support.
And then that got side stepped by the obvious problems with repository size and branching issues (that hg would go onto address later).
>I stand by my position.
If you want to ignore a pretty basic historical timeline that's totally up to you.
No it didn't. GitHub was built because of git's popularity. That's a really silly claim to make and doesn't even logically make sense. The tool was popular, someone built a hosted service for it.
Like think about the insanity of what you're saying. A company was built around some "esoteric" tool, despite plenty of alternatives existing at the time and you think people just whimsically invested in this company because of... what exactly?
You're literally just talking from historical ignorance and making up shit. It's so easy to verify any of the claims you decided to type out yet you chose not to anyway. GitHub believed in Git's popularity, and it paid off.
>I've worked with several developers who don't understand the difference
That's a really neat anecdotal story.
>GitHub could switch to BitKeeper under the covers overnight
No they couldn't. They couldn't even switch to it over a two year time frame. You are making absolutely ridiculous claims with nothing to back it up. BitBucket, owned by Atlassian, has hosted Mercurial repositories. Don't see anyone lining up to switch over to Mercurial.
A really easy claim that is obviously negated by a practical example and you still chose to make it? Legitimately silly.
>All your discussion about git's dominance being a testament to the tractability of the git UI is a false equivalence.
That's not even what that word means.
>When is it ever the case that general acceptance means "objectively the best" instead of "obviously the path of least resistance"?
Don't know if you were around for when git was released but there is now a whole graveyard of SCM's that people actively dropped to switch to git. And BitKeeper was definitely one of them. But I guess those were all dropped because of a future platform that no one knew about at the time. Heavy sarcasm by the way.