How did I miss this! Can you imagine someone claiming Windows is going to be in git as few as 10 years ago? This world never ceases to amaze me. What happened to SourceSafe?
Maybe it was around about the time Microsoft started adding git support to their Visual products? (I don't know, as I don't really use any Microsoft products, but I know Microsoft did embrace git and a lot of OSS tech over the past few years.)
I'm not sure. I have vague recollection of pushback against git on Windows in the early days due to poor performance on that platform, which seems to have evaporated since.
Um.. no it wasn’t. Git was a complete trash fire on Windows when GitHub was founded for one.
I started using git when I was working on embedded Linux professionally in 2005, witnessing the whole bitkeeper saga. I am keenly aware of the history of DVCS 15 years ago.
Meanwhile outside the bubble of academia and startup web devs in 2008, Windows was still by far the most widely used dev platform. I typically deployed Mercurial when I wanted to convince a wider technical audience others of the beauty of DVCS.
GitHub felt safe the same way Instagram (among many) felt safe deploying for iOS only, even when then Android had a larger user base. There are other factors at play, and it was not that git had some kind of major advantage in 2008. If anything mercurial had a slight edge.
But if anything in 2008, the wider DVCS market was still in its infancy.
TIL - Microsoft now uses git for the Windows code base. The blogs.msdn artcles linked by hackernoon was terrible, but hackernoon one line summary was good.
Maybe there have changed ?
Being able not to use windows at Microsoft is a surprise.
Yes, Linus Torvalds developed git because the Linux kernel at the time used Bitkeeper, a proprietary source control system and its owner was changing the license. Now, everyone and their goldfish uses git, and I haven't heard about Bitkeeper in many years.
It hasn't completely obliterated all the competition, but most of it, and those that aren't dead are on life support: in the open-source domain, CVS is mostly dead, SVN isn't far behind, and Mercurial is barely hanging on. In the proprietary domain, it seems only stodgy long-time enterprise customers still use Perforce and ClearCase, and MS's SourceSafe seems to be dead (and MS even bought GitHub).
Git did not run on Windows when Mozilla moved. Git on Windows required running Cygwin was prone to breaking on Cygwin and was slow. This was a pretty big dealbreaker for Mozilla. The imports of Mozilla's ~10 years of CVS dev via the version control's import tool was fragile and none of them imported cleanly without patches.
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