Gergely Orosz

@gergely.pragmaticengineer.com

Imagine a world where the Linux dev community and Linus Torvalds did not create Git in 2005 (or later). What would the "mainstream" version control system be today? CVS? SVN? TFS? Perforce? Mercurial? Just as interesting: why did Git become the de facto version control tool?

Nov 14, 2023 at 23:24 UTC

14 replies 3 reposts 23 likes

Michael Gebetsroither @gebi.bsky.social
[ View ] Nov 15, 2023 at 08:10 UTC

Mercurial probably But mercurial is a real chore with trying to version history structure too, and all those unnamed heads students have lost countless changes with them, and patch queues and different branch types (back then) git is just dead simple in the basics, started with git4compsci with them

0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Noel Frostpaw @noelfrostpaw.bsky.social
[ View ] Nov 15, 2023 at 08:13 UTC

I'm fairly sure Mercurial would be the standard then, as it feels very similar to how git works and operates. From having made the transition myself by ditching SVN over git : Merge Conflicts. Working with multiple people on the same branch of files in SVN was a complete nightmare

0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Xema Blasco @xblasco.bsky.social
[ View ] Nov 15, 2023 at 08:28 UTC

None of them. 18 years is a long time for any version control system.

0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Dhruva @mechanicker.bsky.social
[ View ] Nov 15, 2023 at 01:25 UTC

Mercurial would have probably made it more approachable & ubiquitous. I was able to use Mercurial on OpenVMS back in 2006/07 at HP.

0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes

Max Mustermann @alexanderplatz.bsky.social
[ View ] Jan 11, 2024 at 15:53 UTC

Fossil would have been one surprising contender due to SQLite

0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

@hackbard.bsky.social
[ View ] Nov 15, 2023 at 08:16 UTC

Mercurial 👍

0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

James Felix Black @tft.io
[ View ] Nov 15, 2023 at 00:31 UTC

git is classic path dependence winning, pure New Jersey cockroach shit, not unlike Unix itself.

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

James Felix Black @tft.io
[ View ] Nov 14, 2023 at 23:24 UTC

Mercurial probably

1 replies 0 reposts 7 likes

🚲 @bicycle.bsky.social
[ View ] Nov 14, 2023 at 23:28 UTC

google et al would have stepped in and built one

0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Artem @artemy.nl
[ View ] Nov 15, 2023 at 07:13 UTC

probably mercurial, was the most “hip” option out there

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Rob Isaac @rmi.bsky.social
[ View ] Nov 15, 2023 at 00:34 UTC

Mercurial for startups/unpaid/open source, Bitkeeper for larger teams who can afford it. Handful of kooky svn holdouts, and a tiny fraction of name brand vendor garbage used only by big dumb companies.

0 replies 0 reposts 3 likes

agent jabsco @jabsco.cia.fyi
[ View ] Nov 15, 2023 at 00:22 UTC

GNU Bazaar

0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Gaganpreet @ggn.me
[ View ] Nov 15, 2023 at 11:21 UTC

Mercurial likely. Or some other git like tool would probably have popped up. CVS was already not popular in 2005, Perforce is/was proprietary. SVN was a pain to use (we used SVN at Yahoo till at least 2012 when the switch to git was underway).

0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Jay Nakrani @jaynakrani.bsky.social
[ View ] Nov 15, 2023 at 13:08 UTC

GitHub accelerated the adoption of git. Back in 2011-12, my generation started using git because of GitHub.

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes