Re: Why do GNOMEdevelopers almost exclusively use git mirrors and for example not bzr mirrors

["Elijah Newren" <newren gmail com>]

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 12:35 AM, Jaap A. Haitsma <jaap haitsma org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>  I was just wondering why many GNOME developers are using git mirror
>  and for example not a bzr mirror? If I for example read
>  http://live.gnome.org/DistributedSCM I have the feeling that bzr would
>  also be a very good fit. However I haven't seen any gnome.org project
>  in a bzr mirror while of many projects there exists git mirrors.

It can more or less be explained here:
http://blogs.gnome.org/newren/2007/11/17/adoption-of-various-vcses/

People learn about good tools and practices from other developers.
bzr was far too slow to be used on big projects for many years, and
during that time, git came along and impressed many people with speed
and some of its features.  Thus, developers from big projects started
adopting it.  Then other developers on those big projects started
looking at it.  Then developers of related big projects started
looking at it.  linux kernel->xorg->lowlevel gnome/kde library
maintainers....   Meanwhile, while bzr had superb usability from an
interface point of view, it was (and remember, I am talking past
tense) painful to use even on small personal projects simply due to
the amount of time operations took; there was no way it could be used
for large projects due to these time issues and thus it was cut off
from a lot of the same network effects.

An additional effect causing some of the adoption you've seen were the
svn bridges.  bzr's would require a number of patches to subversion
and still have problems with larger repositories, while git's would
work -- once you figured the commands out (but for those working on
larger projects, they use the version control system a higher
percentage of their day and thus could spend their effort learning the
less friendly interface).

bzr is much faster now and on par with hg & git...but it's way behind
the curve in terms of adoption; it's highest penetration is probably
within gnome users, but even there as you note in your email you find
it lagging and often not used on the larger projects where it could
cause more network effects.  While perhaps it could be...most such
projects have already adopted git.  There are many compelling reasons
to move away from svn, there's not so many for switching between
bzr/hg/git.

Does that help?

Elijah