Re: [DISCUSSION] Growing the Git community

From: Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 25, 2019, 14:02 UTC
Message-ID: <1b988670-381b-1c92-069b-3cb66254861c@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAJ+soVcmMwy7GgLcV-m1kNEsHYirHMQQeFuEYZanbCNUK4_zHg@mail.gmail.com>

On 9/25/2019 9:36 AM, Pierre Tardy wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

>>> As a community, our number one goal is for Git to continue to be the best
>>> distributed version control system. At minimum, it should continue to be
>>> the most widely-used DVCS.
>>
>> I'd rather we stated our goal in terms of what problems we are trying
>> to address rather than accolades we want sent our way.  E.g. "Our goal
>> is to make developers more productive by providing them increasingly
>> useful version control software".

I'll repeat my appreciation for this redirection of focus.

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> Agreed.
> And why restrict on DVCS?
> Isn't it admitted that the distributed version control is nowadays
> much better in term of software productivity?
> Is there some use cases that "traditional" centralized VCS are better
> on, and on which we gave up as a goal?

My intention was "let's be the best at what Git is good at: distributed version control." There are some legitimate reasons why someone would pick something like Perforce instead.

Some things, like file locking, are just easier in centralized systems. I know that Git-LFS created a locking mechanism that pushes even further toward a centralized system. However, it relies on users following a very careful pattern (lock, pull, edit, push, merge, unlock) to avoid conflicts. Further, that only works if you are on a common trunk. Release branches or forks do not have this concept.

Other extensions (like VFS for Git) remove a lot of the truly distributed parts and focus instead on a central source of truth. This works well for some organizations.

Getting on my personal soapbox: I think that we are improving Git so much that people will have few strong reasons to choose other DVCSs. Maybe "hg evolve" is why someone really loves Mercurial, and we can work to build similar features. Maybe there is some repo shapes where another tool is faster, but we could probably make Git faster, too.

Thanks, -Stolee