this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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Friend who is not a software person sent me this tweet, which amused me as it did them. They asked if "runk" was real, which I assume not.

But what are some good examples of real ones like this? xz became famous for the hack of course, so i then read a bit about how important this compression algorithm is/was.

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Git, by Linus? Maybe even linux itself? Ok actually Linus might just be Steve Wozniak without an annoying Steve Jobs guy next to him, while actually being a lot bigger than Apple maybe?

[–] [email protected] 30 points 3 months ago (6 children)

It's really hard to imagine a world without Git. If it hadn't been invented I think it would have been necessary to create it it's one of those things that's hard to imagine and then impossible to work out how you can survive without it.

Yet the vast majority of the world probably don't even know what it is, and wouldn't even understand it if it was explained to them.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Git is not the only version control software out there, and not the first one either.

Facebook for example is famous for not using git. Because their own modified copy of mercurial fits their needs better.

Microsoft didn't use git until relatively recently either. They had to make some big contributions to make it work for their system.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Man, I remember ancient gmod addons released using (iirc) turtle svn so they could auto update. Was a wild time.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

turtle svn

that's a name I've not heard in a long, long time.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That’s a name I’ve never heard before. I have heard of Tortoise SVN though.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Meh, I knew what wizardbeard meant.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Th devs at my current organization use turtle svn, but that seems to be more down to organizational politics combined with a misunderstanding that git is platform agnostic rather than anything based on merits

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

their own modified copy of mercurial fits their needs better

The version I heard was that hg people were way nicer to them and very much willing to help compared to git.

I feel like Linus got a taste of his own medicine dealing with Gtk and Gnome people while developing Subsurface and that caused them to switch to Qt.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

IIRC it's both, sort of. They've contributed a lot to mercurial and, yes, that's largely thanks to mercurial folks being more open and receptive to their desired changes compared to git. But they also have internal tools that build on top of mercurial, tools that you're very unlikely to see used outside facebook projects.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

That make sense mercurial is in python, building on top is easier than C that got is made from

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I remember those days. I used mercurial and svn. And file locking in other solutions.

I'm so happy with git.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago (2 children)

t’s really hard to imagine a world without Git

I've lived it.

  • CriticalFile.vbs
  • CriticalFile.V2.vbs
  • CripicalFile.V2.5.vbs
  • CriticalFile.DONOTEDIT.txt
  • _Old.CriticalFile.aspx
  • LinkToCriticalFilesFold.lnk
  • GuideToDeploying.CriticalFliles.doc
  • CritFil.bat
[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

The first job I had out of college was doing development on the production server with this method of version control. I still have nightmares.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Lots of people still split latex documents into one section per file, because subversion used file locks and we only knew how one person could edit a file at a time.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago

It's not like there was nothing at all in that space before git came along, e.g. we had svn before, and mercurial more or less in parallel.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

And it all happened because botbicket decided to become greedy, to which Linus responded with taking a month break from Linux to make his own basic versioning tool, and here we are.

Without bitbuckets decisions, wer all still be stuck with SVn shudder

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Not necessarily! Maybe we would live in a world of mercurial, or even some other alternative.

And it wasn't bitbucket (botbicket?), but BitKeeper, which gave the Kernel folks a license to use BK, but with some restrictions. Among those was a "no reverse engineering" clause, which is what eventually lead to the revoking of that license—lots of interesting articles on this!—frustrating Linus for a few weeks, and finally the start of Git.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

You're completely right, I mixed up the name over the years. Either way, that action indeed led to git, which killed off bitkeeper

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Minor correction, it was Bitkeeper/BitMover - not Bitbucket. They were proprietary software linux used w/ a community license, and they later removed that free tier.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Oh yeah, you're right! It's been a while.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Everybody would use Mercurial, since Fossil completely lost the race, and both Subversion and CVS are unfit for today's needs.

What is too bad, because Fossil would be much more productive than Git or Mercurial if the software just finished running at all; and Mercurial is way easier to learn than Git.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

Really easy to imagine that world to most people. Like me. Who inspite of using computers since my 386sx family pc, never got into software engineering.

I understand a little about it, but its just a name of a thing i dont know how to use lol

I just find it funny how its a kind of ignorance(for entirely understandable reasons)is bliss situation to me, but a horror to those who use it

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Git has tons of contributors though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Yeah, and Linus mostly handed off the project to Junio Hamano quite early on (same year, 2005). Seriously, huge kudos to Junio for all his work. Still, it's fun to say this quirky guy who likes penguins started not one, but two free software projects that took the world by storm. Humbling, even.