Why did Git become so popular?

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/q/177875/5940

by ashishgandhi • 14 years ago

68 111 14 years ago

programmers.stackexchange.com

fbuilesv• 14 years ago

I think the current answer fails to mention two important things:

1. GitHub.

2. Linus himself wrote it (the kernel previously used BitKeeper but that never got any real traction AFAIK).

Having said that, I think this phrase totally nails it:

"If it's good enough for the Linux kernel, it's good enough for you" is a very convincing argument.

debacle2• 14 years ago

Or, from another perspective, "Linux uses it, so we should too!"

jamesdterry• 14 years ago

No one ever got fired for going with Linus ;-)

ashishgandhi• 14 years ago

GitHub was founded in 2008. The spike is in 2010-01. That's what the question mentions too.

shantanubala• 14 years ago

I'd argue that GitHub became really good 2010-01. It takes a certain number of early adopters to group together before the social features finally become useful for everyone.

slashdotdash• 14 years ago

> Just to make clear, this graph show the installation of git on debian systems. Around the time the spike happens the Debian package was renamed from git-core to git. Maybe people found the package easier now that the name reflected the software. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/177892

nikcub• 14 years ago

that is what network effects look like

for eg. it is comparable to the chart of Facebook growth[0]

[0] http://www.nathaninfocus.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Face...

garenp3• 14 years ago

Before that time, git lacked http support, which means a large population behind firewalls couldn't use it. From memory, that happened sometime in December 2009, which correlates very closely with that graph.

halefx• 14 years ago

Actually the spike is in 2010-04. I don't know that it's really related, but Drupal began switching from CVS to Git in 2010-03. I know a lot of people (myself included) looked at Git for the first time because of that.

pdw• 14 years ago

I wonder how big a factor Windows is. I remember that in 200x several projects (e.g. Mozilla and Java) chose Mercurial over Git because of Git's poor Windows support. At which point did Git become usable on Windows?

_ikke_• 14 years ago

My first encounter with git was in about 2009 on windows, and I don't recall it being unusable.

enobrev• 14 years ago

As a single data point, I chose git due to github around late 2010 and consequently moved a couple of my clients (and current employer) over to git/hub.

I personally still prefer bzr's cli.

silverbax883• 14 years ago

Having used ClearCase, CVS, Subversion, TFS, Git and Mercurial, I would have to say it's because not enough people have tried Mercurial. I have no interest in Git, but I think people like GitHub (or maybe don't know about BitBucket)

debacle2• 14 years ago

Which tool do you prefer the most?

Tloewald2• 14 years ago

We assume ClearCase is the worst, right?

silverbax883• 14 years ago

TFS for large scale enterprise, hands-down. But I don't recommend it for small shops. (Expensive, although I know it's free for shops with 5 devs or fewer) simply because code management is easy and you can build automated deployment without having to use anything else (you can script with PowerBuilder, Ant, whatever if you like, though). The issue I've found with that is it's not easy to find people who don't code for a living but understand scripting enough to build automated deployments. I'm also not crazy about TFS' visual displays of branches - ClearCase (which is god-awful in every other way) has the best visual display of code and branches.

Mercurial for anything smaller or startup. Love it. The issue with Mercurial is that you'll need to determine how you want to do automated deploy builds, but the code management is great and using BitBucket + Hg I never have trouble seeing which code I'm working in or resolving conflicts. I actually think Mercurial has the second-best visual branching display.

pooriaazimi• 14 years ago

To be fair, BitBucket was way uglier than GitHub until very recently (latest redesign). That's a turn-off for most people (unfortunately).

The new BitBucket is awesome, though.

krmmalik• 14 years ago

Clean design inspires confidence. I looked at BitBucket about 2 years ago, and just didn't have enough confidence in it, but recently created quite a few repo's on it and am using them everyday. The new re-design makes all the difference in gaining my trust.

At least that's how I see it.

tterrace• 14 years ago

Definitely. I remember checking out the BitBucket repo for pygments a while back and noticing how clunky the ui was compared to github. The new redesign at a glance seems like a huge improvement.

BadDesign• 14 years ago

Agreed! BitBucket's [http://bitbucket.org/] new UI rocks!

bhadra• 14 years ago

I agree with you. Even though BitBucket allowed private repositories for free, their poor usability and interface kept users away. GitHub is not just Git. GitHub would have become popular due to its ease of use and cool user interface even if it was based on Mercurial (hg) or, may be, even Darcs. Bitbucket's latest design is good but has arrived later than expected.

pekk• 14 years ago

BitBucket is not even close to being as popular as GitHub, and it's not as nice for just browsing around, so the network effect is against it: you don't put code on BitBucket to be seen really.

Free private repos are great, of course.

ajross5• 14 years ago

This contains the answer for why git won: Mercurial people have "no interest" in it. What that tells me is that you have no interest in working with the community and contributing to other peoples' projects, most of which use git these days. Sure, if you want a SCM for your own team or your own private use, you can make a strong case for hg being "better". But that's not what SCM is for.

Using it in your own ivory tower isn't going to impress anyone for the simple reason that no one sees it. Instead, people look at the broader world of all the interconnected git archives in the linux and web development communities, get excited, pull repos and learn git. There's just no equivalent in the hg community that I see. You guys have walled yourselves off, and it's killing your software.

silverbax883• 14 years ago

As I said, I worked with Git. I am no longer interested in it as a solution. I'm not sure why I (or any programmer) would need to 'get excited' to learn Git. It's pretty easy to understand.

jiggy20115• 14 years ago

This seems a little exaggerated. Before git took over there were all kinds of VCS in use including a bunch of proprietary stuff.

If most of your work is done with one group of people inside your company and you decide mercurial is a better fit it would seem silly just to go with git because it is popular.

Besides the two are similar enough that someone versed in mercurial should be able to learn enough git to be useful quickly enough should it be required.

anonymous2• 14 years ago

I looked at mercurial once. I didn't start using it, because it has a more complicated vocabulary than git.

Git just has a directed acyclic graph and pointers to the nodes of it. That's all. End of story.

Mercurial has the concept of a branch, a tag and so on as seemingly separate axiomatic things. It's not as stupid.

I like stupid.

papsosouid2• 14 years ago

>Using it in your own ivory tower isn't going to impress anyone for the simple reason that no one sees it

Using loaded terms to put down people who use the tool they prefer isn't going to convince anyone that your argument has merit.

garenp3• 14 years ago

So you "know" "Mercurial people", yet speak of others as coming from an "ivory tower"? Given that you seem to be in possession of special knowledge, why don't you tell us precisely what "SCM is for"?

samspot3• 14 years ago

A lot of us work on closed-source projects you know. Open source is great, but it isn't the whole world.

micampe3• 14 years ago

Unnecessarily harsh response to a good point.

Network effect: many many people pick git because everyone else uses it (and that’s a good reason), thus they never try Mercurial, which may or may not be better suited to their use case.

klibertp• 14 years ago

My personal favorite is Bazaar, but Mercurial is good, too. I also heard very good opinions about darcs, but didn't try it yet.

Mercurial has BitBucket and Bazaar has Launchpad, so they hardly 'loose' to git and GitHub here. There is but one thing that git does better (I'm forced to use git at work) - it's faster, or at least feels faster. Other than that, on the technical side, both Bazaar and Mercurial are I think on par with git and they win hands down in terms of ease of use.

So, yes, I would guess that the cause of git popularity is primarily Linus and then GitHub and then the popularity itself.

jlgreco4• 14 years ago

Popularity itself is an often overlooked feature. When trying to sell the use of a version control system to others (peers, coworkers, bosses, etc. Or more difficult if you are trying to make an institutional change) you are already in a better position with git than you are with mercurial.

If all mercurial is bringing to the table is being a bit more pleasant, I am still going to pass over it for that reason.

harshreality2• 14 years ago

What do you like about bazaar in contrast to mercurial or git?

pnathan• 14 years ago

I have used Mercurial extensively, and I while I find its interface superior to git, I find that git actually models the kind of development I do.

Also, git is accumulating tooling and integration with other tools much more than hg is, afaict.

16s• 14 years ago

I was a big subversion fan until I took a systems programming position where the dev team used Mercurial. It took me a few weeks to really start liking it, but now I absolutely love it. It's great.

rimantas• 14 years ago

  > I would have to say it's because not enough people have
  > tried Mercurial

Or maybe enough of them tried Mercurial. I know I did, then switched to git and did not look back since.

hnriot• 14 years ago

I switched to hg, found it very much the same as git, no appreciable difference to warrant moving again.

code control is a solved problem and people have moved on to do other things...

_jb• 14 years ago

I don't know when that was, but at some point the rails (sexy) community pushed for git. That sure helped.

Edit: no pun intended ;)

lylejohnson• 14 years ago

I agree that the Rails halo effect probably had a lot to do with it. That's certainly where I first heard about it.

cheald• 14 years ago

Rails moved to Git in 2008, so I don't think that's it.

secure2• 14 years ago

cross-posting my answer here:

The package "gnuit" (GNU Interactive Tools, a file browser/viewer and process viewer) was called "git" in Debian up until 2009-09-09, while git was called "git-core".

Therefore, a better graph to look at is:

http://qa.debian.org/popcon-png.php?packages=git-core%20git&...

Which shows that the popularity did not rise dramatically (take the green line for the left part until they cross, then take the red line).

calinet62• 14 years ago

Not as instant, but still exponential. That's an interesting factoid, but I think the intent of the question remains valid.

pseut• 14 years ago

> Which shows that the popularity did not rise dramatically (take the green line for the left part until they cross, then take the red line).

It's less dramatic, but it does look like there's a pretty substantial increase that can probably be attributed to "using an easier to discover package name." Out of (genuine) curiosity, does the graph include Ubuntu users?

secure2• 14 years ago

The graph does not contain Ubuntu users. Ubuntu also uses popularity contest, but with a separate database from Debian.

The number of popcon submissions in Ubuntu is one order of magnitude higher than the number of popcon submissions in Debian.

Unfortunately, I cannot find out whether Ubuntu makes the graphs publically accessible like Debian does.

dbaupp• 14 years ago

With a bit of image editing: http://i.imgur.com/PmYj7.png

It does look like something happened that caused a spike in popularity.

darkxanthos• 14 years ago

Why it's so important to double check your data.

rjzzleep• 14 years ago

am i the only who's thinking it is a nice real world solution to a real world problem?

npsimons5• 14 years ago

No, that's precisely the feeling I get every time I see an article/comment/blog post saying something along the lines of "why is git winning? Mercurial is superior because it's easier to use, won't let you change history, and it's written in Python!"

calinet62• 14 years ago

A classic case of critical mass. Linus started git, then Github made it social, then everyone started using git, so you did too.

Think of it exactly like an atomic bomb. Atomic bombs are simple: you need fissile material that decays and emits neutrons, and you need it to get close enough to keep a reaction going.

The fissile material in this case is the quality of the software. If it's good, consider it fissile. If it sucks, it probably ain't exploding anytime soon. Git is good. It works, it's fun to use, and it's collaborative.

The trigger was Linux. A large developer community suddenly was introduced to it, and used it day-to-day as Linus was still developing Git itself. The bomb had dropped.

Github was the mechanism itself. It brought all of the developers closer together (like neutrons) and the reaction started spreading. The quality of the experience ensured people actually wanted to be there, and to share it.

Critical mass of ~the social web~ anything in society. 1. Quality, 2. Trigger, 3. Social Mechanism. Boom.

camus• 14 years ago

because git is easy , git is distributed , and github is fancy. My designer team use git yet they cant program. They learned basic git in 4 hours. SVN is much more complicated to work with and to learn for non developers. Mercurial is cool too ,but since most of the library we use are on github my organisation push on github ( and bitbucket ).

lifeguard• 14 years ago

Because hackers said bitkeeper sucked.

jiggy20115• 14 years ago

I wonder how much of the time git is in practice used identically to SVN?

jlgreco4• 14 years ago

Even used like that, there are clear advantages to using git to preform that model rather than SVN. To really get the proper "just like SVN" experience you would have to find a way to make git suck at branches and merging, at the least.

graywh• 14 years ago

And then make add-commit-push a single operation.

jiggy20115• 14 years ago

I never found actually doing branches and merges in SVN any more difficult than git, not sure what the big differences are?

OTOH not having to do the merges on the shared repo is much better and avoids the "don't checkout HEAD just yet 'cos it's all manor of fucked up right now" problem.

Shorel• 14 years ago

Once you do a feature branch... you never go back.

wmitty• 14 years ago

A network effect applies to revision control systems.

Mercurial is a much better fit for how my mind works than Git (I feel that Git is from the school that thrives despite complexity, where I prefer the school that puts lots of effort into a really clean model to minimize complexity).

But I am now giving up on Mercurial: every open source project I play with is on github, so I absolutely need to master Git - and I don't want to keep using two systems.

The network effect wins.

Too• 14 years ago

I think the data source is a bit flawed - "Nr of packages installed on debian"

I would say mercurial is more polished on windows, taking tortoisehg into account. Maybe most mercurial users are on windows while most git users are on linux?

(now i don't believe that mercurial actually is bigger than git, even on windows, but the data from the post is still dodgy)

The "Linux uses git!"-argument is a good one but mercurial has an almost as good one: Firefox. So i don't think that would be an overwhelming factor.

mcantelon• 14 years ago

A blog post from 2010:

http://blog.extracheese.org/2010/05/why-i-switched-to-git-fr...

Concludes that Git handles larger amounts of data more efficiently and stores revision info in a safer/clearer way. Git might be more arcane in terms of it's command syntax, but gets the job done.

ewood• 14 years ago

I worked at a company where we migrated from CVS to Mercurial in 2009 and then to Git a year later. I would say that the general move to distributed source control away from CVS/SVN style centralised systems picked up steam from 09 onwards, and for us Mercurial won over Git initially because it had better Windows support. While I loved Mercurial's more simple command syntax, moving to Git was a no-brainer after we'd been bitten by Mercurial's poor handling of large binary files and Msysgit had improved the Windows support situation. This blog post (http://blog.extracheese.org/2010/05/why-i-switched-to-git-fr...) from 2010 would seem to suggest that others had a similar experience.

cllns• 14 years ago

"Git... literally exploded." :)

npsimons5• 14 years ago

I think the question betrays the authors bias and assumes too much; by claiming that "almost every article comparing mercurial and git" and saying "it seems like Mercurial has a better command line UX", the author is obviously a fan of Mercurial; neither of those points seem to be true. While I can understand the sour grapes at seeing an "inferior" technology win, it's not that clear cut. I haven't used Mercurial enough to really compare, but I can say that most of the supposed "advantages" of Mercurial versus Git seem moot to me. The CLI "UX" differences are negligible, it doesn't matter what languages they are written in, and git is ultimately more flexible due to less dogmatism.

Perhaps the question should be closed with an "already answered" link to this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1598759/git-and-mercurial...

Edit: Followup with some more links:

http://schacon.github.com/2008/11/24/on-mercurial.html

http://tomayko.com/writings/the-thing-about-git

http://blogs.atlassian.com/2012/03/git-vs-mercurial-why-git/

wyuenho2• 14 years ago

You said you haven't used Mercurial much to really compare, and then you compared, and said git is more flexible, and the CLI difference are negligible. So I think you definitely have a bias towards git.

I use Mercurial and Git every day, and I can tell you there's a marked difference between the usability of Mercurial and Git. Git would become totally unusable if it weren't for stackoverflow and google, while I can figure everything out just from Mercurial's short and sweet help manuals.

npsimons5• 14 years ago

I admit I'm biased towards git; but, unlike the original question poster, I can link to articles backing up my assessment that the UX differences between Git and Mercurial are negligible at best, and most likely any perceived differences are highly subjective.

Niten3• 14 years ago

I use both extensively (git for most personal projects, Mercurial at work), so I feel like chiming in here.

I really do think that Mercurial's user interface is easier for beginners to pick up, and more difficult to shoot oneself in the foot with. It's the little things, like the fact that Mercurial's push and pull commands do exactly the opposite of one another, that hg clone/pull URLs are identical to what you type into a web browser to browse the repo, and the ease of dealing with Mercurial "bare" repositories (hg up -r null) for mirroring and backup purposes.

And the way Mercurial's command-line interface strongly discourages one from modifying history; it makes it harder for things to get messed up on a small team coordinating with a shared-access repo. Yes, I know git has the reflog, but in general people seem to have much fewer "OMG WHAT JUST HAPPENED TO MY BRANCH" moments with Mercurial than with git. That (along with mq, which provided a unique solution to our team's needs) was the major reason I chose Mercurial over git at work. If we're going to brandish about the term "UX" here, then I'd say Mercurial definitely has a better "UX" than git.

But Mercurial has pain points, too. The biggest one, in my opinion, is the way branches work: Mercurial started out with named branches, which it seems the community has recognized as a mistake, and has moved to replace with git-style branches (called "bookmarks" in Mercurial land). These work better, but there are still some drawbacks: for one thing, Mercurial lacks the notion of a "remote", so unlike in git your local bookmarks and remote bookmarks have to share the same namespace. This leads to counter-intuitive behavior when it comes to synchronizing bookmarks with a remote server, and often you'll find that bookmarks aren't necessarily updated when you'd expect them to be.

Additionally, the notion of a "tip" makes working with feature branches frustrating, because by default Mercurial will check out from whatever branch was pushed to most recently, rather than a de-facto standard "master" as in git. Hand in hand with this complaint, by default Mercurial will want to push all your changesets, not just those under your current working bookmark, so you have to constantly specify e.g. "hg push -r master" to keep from pushing local throw-away branches. And it's not easy to delete local throw-away branches if you decide you don't want them (the downside of Mercurials aversion toward history modification), so one generally winds up using a separately-cloned repo for temporary work, which is unfortunate in contrast with git.

Mercurial and git are both great, efficient, high-performance tools. But if I had to generalize, I'd say that Mercurial is better for beginners and for "enterprisey" usage, whereas git, despite its interface inconsistencies, can be more powerful once you fully understand it and its data model (but only if you aren't working primarily on Windows, and don't need Mercurial Queues).

alwillis5• 14 years ago

From what I can see, Mercurial actually has more flexibility when it comes to branching: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-me...

npsimons5• 14 years ago

but only if you aren't working primarily on Windows

Again, I'll admit I'm biased (I'm mostly a Linux guy), but for the day job, they are currently paying me to develop stuff for Windows, and both myself (via Cygwin), and my current coding partner (via MSysGit) have no issues whatsoever with Git in Windows. A previous team member also quickly adapted to Git via TortoiseGit.

The flexibility of being able to rewrite history, the staging area, stashes and branching quickly are just too powerful, and being both code monkeys and CLI junkies, we don't miss the "integration" much (albeit, I love EGG: https://github.com/byplayer/egg).

ngyt• 14 years ago

Because github is backed by $100+ million of venture capital and they have been virally marketing their tool.

programminggeek• 14 years ago

Because it's awesome?

I personally started using git because github made setting up hosted version control so darned easy and nice. Also, I hated using SVN from my work life experience, so I knew I didn't want to use that on my own projects.

Once I understood the power of git branching there is no way I could ever go back. Also, I tried mercurial and it always felt slower and "worse". Git commands might be cryptic, but it's always felt faster and had a community around it that makes better tools for it.

wiremine2• 14 years ago

I remember attending an OSCON session on git vs. Subversion back in 2006 or 2007. The presenter's thesis was basically that git was more efficient than subversion when it came to branching.

Near the end he walked through the distributed nature of git. That was the second of third OSCON I attended, and I have never seen, nor have I seen since, that many utterly confused developers in a single room.

At the time I thought it was just a poor presentation.

With the benefit of hindsight, I've realized the presentation was just fine. We, the developers, just had that much baggage from using CSV and Subversion. "What do you mean forking isn't evil!" "What do you mean you can branch like that?"

It feels like, at some point, there was a tipping point of younger developers who didn't have to unlearn subversion. Makes me wonder what other heresies we'll do a 180 degree turn on in the future...

freework• 14 years ago

Hopefully, test driven development will be one of them. I don't know what will replace it, but some day we'll look back and say "I can'r believe we used to spend so much time writing so many tests"

npsimons5• 14 years ago

If you don't test it, how do you know it works?

wiremine2• 14 years ago

Maybe, but the we'd need incredibly better tools than what we have today. Git was a vastly better tool, which enabled us to reshape the culture around how we managed code. Test-driven development is a culture that lacks git-level tools.

cdibona• 14 years ago

The uptick in 2010 has a lot to do with the introduction of git over http solidifying and I firmly believe that android's use of git, which is extensive and that reliance on git coupled with the rise of the platform pulled an incredible number of developers onto Git and over the learning hump.

If you can find the 'open source updates' from oscon on youtube/oreilly, Shawn Pearce gives an architectural update that will inform your speculations.

drue• 14 years ago

Popularity begets popularity. I evaluated a ClearCase replacement in early 2012 for a large company, and Git is clearly the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" SCM.

I looked at hg. It is easier, especially for the windows users. However, git was already coming from a few different directions and hg's simplicity was not enough to tip the scale.

We are now mid-migration. If git devs are listening - this is my biggest nit:

$ apropos git | grep ^git | wc -l 159

I do believe an alternative "porcelain" will eventually supplant the core git commands, making it more user friendly.

robodale• 14 years ago

Shut up about the tools you use and write some damn code. http://importantshock.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/git-vs-mercur...

alwillis5• 14 years ago

I like this one better: Git is Wesley Snipes, Mercurial is Denzel Washington: http://www.ericsink.com/entries/hg_denzel.html

Why did Git become so popular?

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