Wednesday, February 18, 2009

DVCS musings

Every so often, there are a spate of blog posts ragging on git. Probably because of who wrote it, and it's importance to the kernel, negative criticism of git tends to get rather widely broadcast, and attracts the same sort of stupid fanboy'ish flamewars that plague many bits of the free software ecosystem, and there always seems to be a "my DVCS is better than yours" flamewar just waiting in the wings to really get the discussion going.

To me, much of the discussion feels very much like the old emacs vs vi flamewars, before they became parodies of themselves. Given the trend towards easy interoperability, with tools such as git-svn, the bzr svn plugin, the various git fastimport helpers, and so forth, increasingly, the choice of (D)VCS is as independent of the other people in the project as the choice of editor. In a few years, hopefully people will actually realise this, and the whole debate will calm down. At which point, we can all return to arguing about the important things, like editors.

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