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pheggstoday at 3:42 PM2 repliesview on HN

I was already pretty happy with svn to be honest, I dont see myself switching away from the industry standard today for no substantial reason. in my opinion git was only able to change the standard thanks to github and a popular author (i love git and its branching, but I dont think it would have been enough if it was just for that). I personally believe its going to be very difficult for jj to replicate that.


Replies

GuB-42today at 5:26 PM

In my opinion, svn lost to git because git is just so much better in a distributed environment. To me the improvement between git and svn is much more than the improvement between svn and cvs. In fact, by many aspects, I preferred cvs, but now that we have git, they can both go to hell.

Now, it is not the only DVCS, there is also Mercurial, which is built on similar principles. It could have become the standard, but I agree with you that the reason it didn't probably has to do with Github and Linux.

jj isn't fundamentally different from git, it is actually compatible with git, which is a good and a bad thing. Good because it makes transition easy, bad because it is fundamentally the same thing and there is no pressing reason to change.

But jj definitely look nicer than git, which is not hard, under the hood, git is great, but it is ugly. It started off as a hack and it still shows. I think the common sentiment of "I know git, I don't want to learn a new VCS" mostly tells about how painful the process of learning git was. If you had started off with Mercurial, like I did, I am sure it would feel much smoother, it is just git that is messy. For jj, it looks like they took the best parts of git and mercurial, so hopefully, the transition will be rather painless.

newsofthedaytoday at 4:02 PM

I like the distributed nature of git but miss how svn worked to some degree. Generally I agree with you, git works, I read the post and didn't see anything that makes me want to change. The small number of jjites who have been inundating comment sections on this site lately feels like the devotees of Rust (a crap language), podman (which has too many operational inconsistencies) and JetBrains IntelliJ ballywhooers who used to preach IntelliJ's features on every programming related site.