Re: [ANNOUNCE] Git wiki

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: May 3, 2006, 15:30 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0605030817580.4086@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <4458C5D7.8010501@op5.se>

On Wed, 3 May 2006, Andreas Ericsson wrote:

> 
> Considering Sun's CEO's common comments on Solaris' superiority over Linux I
> think it's safe to assume that the same CEO wouldn't exactly jump of joy if
> his employees started depending on a tool fathered by Linus.

I doubt it went that high up, but with any kind of politics it's obviously possible that somebody consciously or unconsciously felt it might become a political problem, and it might have made a difference.

However, I think the _real_ issue is that Mercurial has a much nicer introductory phase. The standard mercurial web-page is so much more professional and nice to look at than any git page I have ever seen, and let's face it: first looks _do_ count.

Also, the fact that Solaris had the unfortunate bug with signals probably didn't much help to endear git to them, since it made it look like git had problems. Never mind that we solved it - I think it took us a while to even realize that Solaris had a problem, because we weren't intimately involved.

Which brings me to the final point, which is that I think the hg team was very active and supporting, perhaps Matt himself. That's _important_ - the OpenSolaris people probably felt very comfortable with strong support from the developers. It can often be _the_ best (and biggest) reason to choose any product - regardless of anything else.

Even if I think the git mailing list itself is very responsive, I think the hg people were just more directly and actively involved. For git, they had to come to us.

I also suspect that some people find python scripts somewhat less intimidating than C. I'll also happily admit that my coding standards tend to lean towards the "sparse" when it comes to comments, and I much prefer the "small and well-named functions" approach, and git seems to have stuck to that with Junio. Which just turns some people off.

So I don't think you need politics to explain it. I think hg is doing quite well. It took some different design decisions, and while I personally think the git ones are better, I'm somewhat biased ;)

			Linus