Re: Cross-Platform Version Control (was: Eric Sink's blog - notes on git, dscms and a "whole product" approach)

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:

As I mentioned, Eric is taking the perspective of offering a supported SCM to a large and diverse audience. As such, his notes are interesting not because he's right or he's wrong.

We can be "right" and say "don't do that" if we shrink our audience so that it looks a lot like us. There, fixed.

But something tells me that successful tools are -- by definition -- tools that grow past their creators use.

So from Eric's perspective, it is worthwhile to work on all those issues, and get the right for the end user -- support things we don't like, offer foolproof catches and warnings that prevent the user from shooting their lovely toes off to mars, etc.

His perspective is one of commercial licensing, but even if we aren't driven by the "each new user is a new dollar" bit, the long term hopes for git might also be to be widely used and to improve the version control life of many unsuspecting users.

To get there, I suspect we have to understand more of Eric's perspective.

that's my 2c.

m