Gregory's Server@tess Is it? It's older than git by a decade, right? And it's still a commercial product, I thought.
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20 comments
 @tess Version control is an area where I'd be especially cautious about vendor lock-in. Especially in this age of enshittification. There's no way I'm trusting a company owned by private equity over a long-term relationship. And that's before we get to all the open-source concerns, where I think git has a legitimate edge. I think the Perforce/SVN centralization/SPoF model can be fine for companies. But that centralized control mindset doesn't work for richer relationship approaches. @williampietri even OSS projects have a central repo with the "canonical" source; I don't see the difference between hosting code on github or equivalent vs having it on a hosted SVN server. I agree git focused too much on the most complex uses. But I also think git could be way better for the common use cases while still supporting less common ones. And I think and approach of "who cares about common open-source use cases" is not going to lead to much improvement in open-source version-control systems. Is there a package or distribution that does care about the niche needs of the FOSS community that is also routinely and happily used by people who are not members of that community? Earnest question because I can't think of anything, even Linux repos mostly avoided until there were non FOSS-centric distributions and I remember how controversial that was back when  I've always thought Mercurial was nice whenever I encountered it. Haven't used it extensively, though. Debian distro has few off-shoots, which are more niche, like edu, multimedia and geodata FOSS communities. AFAIK they have non-FOSS shadow sisters in corp/govt world.  @tess @williampietri Having done that, I can tell you that using Git as a Subversion frontend was way better than using svn as a Subversion front-end (and yes, I agree git is terrible .. but also "worse is better" etc) @meejah @williampietri "worse is better" is actually an argument not to use git tho? Like, in the original sense of the phrase? @tess @williampietri Maybe? (I'm not trying to defend git's UX here .. but also I've used RCS a little, CVS and Subversion a lot and it's 100x better than those, IMO) @tess @williampietri I certainly think the history of Git's development -- or at least, my recollection of it -- matches the "worse is better" notions: it was "just better enough" than sending around literal tarballs that it gained traction. I followed more expanded on why git _looks_ wrong. And I have another person saying git was hard. Combined, I think I see why it _looks_ wrong. Would you be interested to discuss it in more safe way, without blowing flames and more like service design folks do?  @williampietri @tess i feel like warning about vendor lock-in for Git alternatives is funny. Sure GitHub the company doesn't control(?) Git the software but in terms of mindshare/how most people are exposed to Git they absolutely have the majority. Most people will host their code or touch code hosted on GitHub and `git` is just how you interact with it ๐ There is no vendor lock-in here. You can use git entirely locally. You can use git with other hosting services. Whereas I believe there are exactly zero other companies with Perforce-compatible cloud repositories. @williampietri @Eramdam @tess and changing providers for that central source of truth is supported out of the box and trivial.  |
@williampietri free for a lot of small-scale use IIRC, and pretty constantly updated also IIRC, plus what's wrong with paying for a good tool?
But fine, use subversion plus a decent OSS shell integration.