Ryan Tomayko

The fighting's been fun and all, but it's time to shut up and get along —

Benjamin Pollack — one of the guys that helped build Fog Creek’s Mercurial based source control system, Kiln — pleads for Git and Hg folks to stop bickering over stupid shit and team up to go after the massive number of Subversion/CVS holdouts.

I can confirm one of his points:

It’s easy, in the yin/yang of Hacker News and proggit, to forget that most developers are not even aware of what DVCSes are or what they do. Yeah. Sounds crazy, I know, but trust me on this.

This is true. My second day on the job at GitHub was spent at the Zend PHP conference. Maybe 10% of the people we talked to had any awareness of DVCS at all, and a big chunk of that 10% hadn’t used DVCS seriously on a project. This was six months ago.

For most popular programming language communities, I’d put the percentage of developers that really understand DVCS under 1%.

commit-patch —

A nice solution to “The Tangled Working Copy Problem” for VCS’s that don’t allow you to pluck out portions of a working copy to commit. Allows editing the diff that’s about to be committed.

The Differences Between Mercurial and Git —

I can’t say whether this is an accurate description of hg but he nails a lot of the things that makes git interesting, IMO.

What a DVCS gets you (maybe) —

Bill de hÓra gives some reasons for using a distributed VCS even when the downstream repo is non-distributed.

Why I chose git —

Wherein Aristotle convinces me to seriously consider moving my experimental bzr projects to git. I’ve seen the content vs. file tracking argument before but never really understood what the actual impact of this difference was.

Bill de hÓra: Mercurial, Part I —

Nice look at one of the better distributed version control clients picking up mindshare.