gonna do a short thread of git vs other version control systems polls just to get an overall vibe
poll 1: if you've used both hg and git, which do you prefer?
(no replies please though, i have already read 300 comments about git vs other version control systems today and i can't read more)
poll 2: if you've used both svn and git, which do you prefer?
(no replies please, i have already read 300 comments about git vs other version control systems today and they were great but i can't read more)
poll: is any of these your favourite version control system?
(please don't reply if your answer is "other”, i have some polls elsewhere in this thread about other systems)
poll: is any of these your favourite version control system?
(please don't reply if your answer is "other”, i have some polls elsewhere in this thread about other systems)
@cliffle haha kind of but it seems really annoying to do it rigorously so I'm probably just going to put these polls out there and let people draw their own conclusions.
I was surprised that people who answered the hg vs git poll generally prefer git since I hear "mercurial is better" so much. I guess a lot of people prefer mercurial but not a majority? Or maybe I didn't phrase it well enough. Who knows.
@Conan_Kudo @cliffle @b0rk (I worked on hg/sapling at Meta for many years)
This is somewhat true, but also for many of the most advanced workflows, revsets are much nicer than whatever series of messes git has.
Consider jujutsu, it has an interface very similar to hg while being fully compatible with existing (colocated) git repos, and *much* better support for rebases than git or hg
@c0dec0dec0de @b0rk Mine too.
I have a whole section of Clearcase induced scars, but thankfully I've stopped having nightmares involving "Your VOB is corrupt". :)
@gnomon I have exactly once been in a situation where we had a choice of ClearCase or Git, looked at how we needed to be able to manage the versions and said "ClearCase, definitely"
I think it's also the first time our SW CM had supported a project with pure ClearCase, no wrapper scripts to dumb it down, on purpose (I'm sure it happened before they had the wrapper scripts—reading between the lines it was a disaster never to be spoken of, even in whispers)
@c0dec0dec0de @b0rk
@gnomon multiple subsystems developed by external suppliers (so binaries & config files) with crappy custom-binary build systems that expect files to show up in their tree, but said files are externally supplied and depended on what the other subsystems were for a given build
And Windows, so no symlinks
And multiple build flavors (debug, test, etc) where only one subsystem might be a special config that day
A VCS that lets you specify arbitrary branches on a file level is basically perfect
@gnomon absolutely!
It was hilarious when it happened because we had for years been fighting that SW CM (in some cases bitterly) to replace ClearCase with Git on our projects, overcoming claims it was unnecessary, too different, etc and ultimately forced her to accept the switch by going over her head. So big extended drama…
And then we hit this use case and agreed unanimously "definitely ClearCase"!
She was so excited, too! 😆 I think we healed a lot of wounds that day
me, seeing this post : "Ooooh, she fell down THAT rabbit hole I've wanted to explore for a while. So cool, we're about to get an accessible state of the art about next-gen VCS"
@josephholsten @spacehobo @b0rk
They do go to some trouble to say on their website that they're not a theory-of-patches based system like darcs, which, well, not a selling point for me, but I wonder if there is some math-phobia going on too where the fact that darcs is based on a formal theory makes people afraid that they can't understand or work with it.
@b0rk yeah no worries the whole thing is my fault. I'm just surprised how quick other's chimed in too.
At any rate, sorry for all the noise.
@b0rk Oof, I almost want this poll as an inverse, i.e. "least favourite."
CVS, in particular, required an awful lot of hand-holding to make sure it would give me checkouts that were actually a valid configuration of the codebase (if memory serves, it's because its model is versioning per-file, not commit nodes or checkpoints, so it was pretty straightforward to get the versions into a state that had never actually been seen during the development flow).
@b0rk I had to lookup if ClearCase still exists (It does.) I have no thoughts about it. Just that it was the first VCS I used back at the turn of the millennium.
I have never come across again. I suspect it’s super expensive, and only giant ossified megacorp still use it. I guess it had some advantage over cvs, but again, I have no opinion.
I have not heard much about fossil. Who actually uses it and what for?
@railmeat @b0rk The SQLite folks created and use it. It's an all-in-one app with Web UI and uses, of course, a SQLite DB for repo metadata storage.
Fossil is said to work best with the "cathedral" model, while Git is better for "bazaar"-style projects.
About:
https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
Fossil vs Git:
https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/fossil-v-git.wiki (See section 2.5.1 here about cathedral vs bazaar)
@b0rk CVS probably would be if I lived in a world that didn't need the things it isn't good at, but...
(Having used CVS extensively, I really don't understand the hate it gets; it's effective at the things it tries to do and probably close to the best possible realization of its core design. It's just that "things it tries to do" doesn't cover all the problems I want a tool in that space to solve.)
I know just barely enough about perforce to suspect that I'd have similar feelings about it if I had ever used it enough to know it well.
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