Comment by necovek
4 days ago
I do not think that's how it worked out for GitHub: I'd rather say that Git (as complex as it was to use) succeeded due to becoming the basis of GitHub (with simple, clean interface).
At the time, there were multiple code hosting platforms like Sourceforge, FSF Savannah, Canonical's Launchpad.net, and most development was still done in SVN, with Git, Bazaar, Mercurial the upstart "distributed" VCSes with similar penetration.
Yes, development was being done in SVN but it was a huge pain. Continuous communication was required with the server (history lookups took ages, changing a file required a checkout, etc.) and that was just horribly inefficient for distributed teams. Even within Europe, much more so when cross-continent.
A DVCS was definitely required. And I would say git won out due to Linus inventing and then backing it, not because of a platform that would serve it.
I was involved with bzr and Launchpad: anybody using pure Git hated it. GitHub, even with fewer features compared to LP, was pretty well regarded.
Yes, kernel and Linus used it, but he used a proprietary VCS before that did not go anywhere anyway, really.
> changing a file required a checkout
SVN didn't need checkouts to edit that I recall? Perforce had that kind of model.
As did cvs. But you are right.
I am not sure, it seems I did misremember. Though it's possible I was actually working with needs-lock files. I can definitely see a certain coworker from that time to put this on all files :/
And even in P4, you could checkout files only at the end, kind of like `git add`. Though this could provide some annoyance if someone had locked the file in the upstream.
Yes to all that. And GitLab the company was only founded in 2014 (OSS project started in 2011) and ran through YC in 2015, seven years after GitHub launched.
and most of those, except maybe gitlab, were clunky AF to use