On Aug 03, 2008, at 3:36 pm, David Bremner wrote:
I think this view is probably coloured by your background in web development. I have used git for about a year now, and never visited GitHub. I'm not saying you have to like git, but it does have other features other than a snazzy web site.
Hi David I think I gave the wrong impression there. After all, I use darcs despite it not having a snazzy website! What I mean is that git usage has snowballed since GitHub was released, so people are clearly attracted to the website first, and the SCM second. It's a bit like the way Rails created thousands of Ruby programmers by association, many of them with no idea what Ruby was all about, just a vague notion that Rails could solve their problem. Ultimately my point is I think that MercurialHub or BazaarHub (BazaarBazaar?) would have been as successful.
I do agree that adoption of development tools is driven by network effects. When I chose a DVCS to learn, I only wanted to learn one, so I chose the one that seemed like it had the most momentum. The rich get richer...
I tend to very stubbornly work the other way... choose the tool I think works best with very little regard for its momentum, unless of course it clearly has none. Hence my love of darcs and recent interest in Haskell. (I'll figure it out, one day!)
Maybe the answer is to work on Darcs-git :-)
Well that's been looked at before... unfortunately it's been abandoned now. There's also discussion on darcs-users that a Haskell implementation of Git would finally settle the "Haskell is too slow" debate. Now I think if the world is going to use git, a better implementation would be a good thing (I know a developer who got VERY frustrated trying to program against it). Personally I think the developer time would be better invested in fixing darcs bugs and improving its performance. Ashley -- http://www.patchspace.co.uk/ http://aviewfromafar.net/