Re:Before GitHub
by anotherevan on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @09:13PM
(#47943023)
I'm still using Mercurial whenever I can (including work!). The Tortoisehg GUI is good for doing reviews, and the command line is comfortable.
I grew up on CVS and then Subversion. Played with Bazaar a little, mainly because it could use an SFTP location as the back-end.
And I still avoid Git if I can help it. I would/do figure it out when I have to, but it never feels comfortable. Such is my avoidance that I'm dabbling with Jujutsu although I'll still need to really sit down and read through it some more to grok the way it works.
Re:Before GitHub
by sourcegrift on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @01:18AM
(#47944433)
You might like pijul if you like darcs
If it got proper tooling this would be true—but the community will need to build it. Darcs has more out of the box & more existing ecosystems to work with. Pijul is barebones by design, ready to be scripted, there’s just not much out there.
Re:Before GitHub
by Karrot_Kream on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @02:32PM
(#47952450)
Yeah I've played around with pijul over the years but it's still not at a maturity level that I would like and at this point I'm not sure how the actual work behind patch theory is progressing.
Re:Before GitHub
by vintermann on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @08:42AM
(#47947520)
My first distributed VCS was Tom Lord's Arch. I may have started early, but it took me a long time to understand distributed version control, thanks in no small part to Tom Lord, lol. GNU.
I was exposed to Mercurial before Git and I stubbornly tried to advocate for it over Git for a while. BitBucket, at the time, gave Github a good run for their money and had great Mercurial support and was what I preferred.
I'm not really sure VCS were ever differentiated for there to be a wide world of them. They all solved the same set of problems so similarly that it felt, to me, that there had to be one winner. Right now most of the competition is in the Git Porcelain space.
N.B. I actually have a soft spot for darcs, which was my first actual DVCS. I just loved it so much more than svn and refused to use svn in college and used darcs to actually manage my projects and push them to svn after.