Ask Experienced Devs @programming.dev Dominic @programming.dev 1y ago

Do people use git alternatives?

I know other version control software exists, but does anyone use it? Why? What are the differences? All I've ever actually seen people use is git.

28 comments

There is pijul.

Pijul's defining feature is its innovative algebra of patches model for version control, allowing changes to be applied in any order without creating conflicts, thus simplifying collaborative work.

It efficiently handles branches and merges, with its patch theory often enabling it to automatically resolve conflicts, eliminating much of the headache typically associated with merge conflicts.

Pijul is also free and open-source

Check this out: https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/05/23/for-those-who-just-dont-git-it-ep-573/
- I am so incredibly intrigued by this! This might sound like a dumb question, but are there any examples of what this looks like hosted on GitHub? My employer mandates GitHub as a standardized location for enterprise code. So I'm curious if there's a way to live in both worlds at once and not go mad.
  
  Afaik GitHub is for git only. While you can import existing git projects, pijul has its own web frontend called nest.
Git is definitely dominating the landscape. The fact that it is free software plays a big role. There are alternatives, but they are unlikely to gain much adoption. They may provide slightly better UX or marginally more comfortable flows, but it's not enough to replace Git. Not to mention, most developers don't even really care about which SCM they use.
- Not to mention, most developers don’t even really care about which SCM they use.
  
  Get them to use CVS for a while. They will care then.
  
  You are right about that! It was a pain to work with :)
  
  I never used CVS but the senior developer at one place mentioned about it once when I complained about subversion which we used there (this was in 2013).
There’s perforce which is primarily used for game development. Often games have a lot of binary files that are hard/impossible to generate diffs of unlike text based files. Perforce requires you to check out individual files and prevents any merge conflicts on an individual file basis.
- My experience with Perforce hasn't been really positive - especially compared to Plastic SCM, which is amazing. The merge tracking in history is such a cool feature, and it's generally really smooth to work with.
  
  The only issue is the pricing model, which is also a reason why I sadly can't use it on many projects. Unity way too greedy and their strategy is to just acquire and paywall anything usable.
- Checkout doesn't prevent merge conflicts (unless you configure exclusive checkout which is quite annoying). We used perforce and definitely had merge conflicts, though they weren't as crazy as a long git branch would be.
I actually kind of miss Subversion etc now. Git was perfectly designed for open source projects, but its easy branching model has significantly undermined the practice of Continuous Integration in enterprise environments. I get that maybe devs just prefer working in an isolated branch, but something has been lost.
- Couldn't agree more. We used Crucible as a code reviewing tool, which allowed us to develop directly on main while being able to pick-and-choose commits to add to a review. This closed that CI gap for us in a meaningful way.
  
  However, Crucible seems to be reaching end of life (my company even denied renewal of licenses for it). So now we're forced back into Gitflow, and it's sooooo painful.
Domains like CAD use revision control, if you're looking for a rabbit hole to a parallel world to get lost in on a Sunday. It's not to be completely confused with RCS that predated VCS.
Mercurial (hg) is a fine alternative that was widely adopted in the early 2010s, but has gradually lost mind share to git. Actually every company that I worked for in the 2010s had a Mercurial service (maybe unloved). I think companies adopted it because command line hg is closer to svn, and more obvious in general, so it was an easier migration from svn. I also think out-of-the-box hgserve is easier to understand than git serve, so before tools like GitLab and Gitea it was easier to host on-prem.

Mercurial's data model is indistinguishable from git, and IIRC it even slightly pre-dates git. The main thing git had going for it was GitHub, but that was enough to build a positive feedback loop and come to dominate the mindshare.
Some people that require support for a lot of big binary assets probably use something else.
- There is Git Large File Storage for that. But there may of course be alternatives that are better suited for that kind of tasks.
I've heard of some corporate environments using different tools because of some weird use case, but honestly I think it doesn't justify, if you're taking it seriously you should be using git.
- At work, we use on-prem Azure DevOps, with VSTFS source control. Some of the codebase has been around since before Git was decently integrated in VS and DevOps.
There is only one alternative for distributed version control, Mercurial. Everything else is significantly inferior, except maybe for special cases. Mercurial may be fine for newcomers to step in, but probably at some point the flexibility of Git will be missed. And because of so many people using Git there are more solutions to specific problems.
- Everything else is significantly inferior
  
  Which ones did you try?
Git is freaking amazing. Any current alternative is going to be a joke next to it.

People using other ones are simply missing out.
- I've heard good things about hg though I haven't used it myself. Git has the biggest mindshare that I never bothered even checking. Might as well use it and move on.

28 comments