Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
Friend who is not a software person sent me this tweet, which amused me as it did them. They asked if "runk" was real, which I assume not.
But what are some good examples of real ones like this? xz became famous for the hack of course, so i then read a bit about how important this compression algorithm is/was.
Git, by Linus? Maybe even linux itself? Ok actually Linus might just be Steve Wozniak without an annoying Steve Jobs guy next to him, while actually being a lot bigger than Apple maybe?
It's really hard to imagine a world without Git. If it hadn't been invented I think it would have been necessary to create it it's one of those things that's hard to imagine and then impossible to work out how you can survive without it.
Yet the vast majority of the world probably don't even know what it is, and wouldn't even understand it if it was explained to them.
Git is not the only version control software out there, and not the first one either.
Facebook for example is famous for not using git. Because their own modified copy of mercurial fits their needs better.
Microsoft didn't use git until relatively recently either. They had to make some big contributions to make it work for their system.
Man, I remember ancient gmod addons released using (iirc) turtle svn so they could auto update. Was a wild time.
that's a name I've not heard in a long, long time.
That’s a name I’ve never heard before. I have heard of Tortoise SVN though.
Meh, I knew what wizardbeard meant.
Th devs at my current organization use turtle svn, but that seems to be more down to organizational politics combined with a misunderstanding that git is platform agnostic rather than anything based on merits
The version I heard was that hg people were way nicer to them and very much willing to help compared to git.
I feel like Linus got a taste of his own medicine dealing with Gtk and Gnome people while developing Subsurface and that caused them to switch to Qt.
IIRC it's both, sort of. They've contributed a lot to mercurial and, yes, that's largely thanks to mercurial folks being more open and receptive to their desired changes compared to git. But they also have internal tools that build on top of mercurial, tools that you're very unlikely to see used outside facebook projects.
That make sense mercurial is in python, building on top is easier than C that got is made from
I've lived it.
The first job I had out of college was doing development on the production server with this method of version control. I still have nightmares.
Lots of people still split latex documents into one section per file, because subversion used file locks and we only knew how one person could edit a file at a time.
It's not like there was nothing at all in that space before git came along, e.g. we had svn before, and mercurial more or less in parallel.
And it all happened because botbicket decided to become greedy, to which Linus responded with taking a month break from Linux to make his own basic versioning tool, and here we are.
Without bitbuckets decisions, wer all still be stuck with SVn shudder
Not necessarily! Maybe we would live in a world of mercurial, or even some other alternative.
And it wasn't bitbucket (botbicket?), but BitKeeper, which gave the Kernel folks a license to use BK, but with some restrictions. Among those was a "no reverse engineering" clause, which is what eventually lead to the revoking of that license—lots of interesting articles on this!—frustrating Linus for a few weeks, and finally the start of Git.
You're completely right, I mixed up the name over the years. Either way, that action indeed led to git, which killed off bitkeeper
Minor correction, it was Bitkeeper/BitMover - not Bitbucket. They were proprietary software linux used w/ a community license, and they later removed that free tier.
Oh yeah, you're right! It's been a while.
Everybody would use Mercurial, since Fossil completely lost the race, and both Subversion and CVS are unfit for today's needs.
What is too bad, because Fossil would be much more productive than Git or Mercurial if the software just finished running at all; and Mercurial is way easier to learn than Git.
Really easy to imagine that world to most people. Like me. Who inspite of using computers since my 386sx family pc, never got into software engineering.
I understand a little about it, but its just a name of a thing i dont know how to use lol
I just find it funny how its a kind of ignorance(for entirely understandable reasons)is bliss situation to me, but a horror to those who use it
Git has tons of contributors though.
Yeah, and Linus mostly handed off the project to Junio Hamano quite early on (same year, 2005). Seriously, huge kudos to Junio for all his work. Still, it's fun to say this quirky guy who likes penguins started not one, but two free software projects that took the world by storm. Humbling, even.