Fossil User Forum: Is Git irreplaceable?

Is Git irreplaceable?

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Is Git irreplaceable?

(1)<br>By Warren Young (wyoung) on 2019-07-21 06:34:08 [source]

I worry that Git might be the last mass-market DVCS within my lifetime. Git effectively has a global monopoly on DVCSes, and I don't see how you replace such a thing.

Replacing RCS with CVS was easy. Replacing CVS with Subversion was a big fight in many places. Replacing the remaining CVS and Subversion repos with something modern may never happen. Replacing Git with something better looks impossible.

Old small tech monopolies have fallen many times — e.g. VisiCalc — but I'm struggling to come up with a case where a truly global monopoly like Git has fallen to a single replacement. Here are my best examples, and they're all weak:

Metcalfe's original Ethernet has been replaced a bunch of times, but we either keep calling its replacement Ethernet or we quickly make an Ethernet bridge for it. (e.g. WiFi)

Fossil's already participating in the Git monopoly in this way through fossil git export and fossil import git.

Microsoft's long-term stalwarts Windows and Office are dying, but they're not being replaced by a single thing. There's a diaspora for each: mobile OSes, Chrome OS, and desktop Linux on one side, and everything from Markdown to Google Docs on the other.

Fossil is part of the Git diaspora, but that's a long way from achieving anything like a replacement of Git.

Adobe's having a hard time hanging onto its old market, but it's because people are abandoning their powerful professional general-purpose tools in favor of task-specific and less-functional alternatives: CMSes instead of page-oriented web design, mobile photo apps instead of Photoshop, the web instead of print...

I can only think of one case where a formerly market-leading Adobe product has been completely replaced by a single thing: Flash and HTML5. Observe that it took many years and a tremendous amount of market power to pull that off. Every other dead Adobe product is going the diaspora route, and the dying ones are going that direction, too.

I believe Adobe's Creative Cloud subscription model is relevant here only in that it is a rational reaction of Adobe's leadership to the dying market, not the cause of it.

Even if you believe CC is killing Adobe, that's irrelevant to our argument here, since subscriptions are the sustaining life force for GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, etc. not their poison. Fossil's world domination will not come from dissatisfaction over subscription fees elsewhere. To the extent that anyone's replacing those cloud repository services with Fossil, I believe it's far more likely due to a wish for control, security, and overall simplicity than a desire to save money.

The market's spoken on that point already with the move to cloud services, where we relinquish control and tolerate lower security to gain some up-front simplicity. It's really easy to set up a basic Fossil server, but it's not as easy as signing up for a GitHub account. Then if you want to add HTTPS to that, running a Fossil server suddenly becomes a lot more complicated.

IPv4 still won't go away despite the standardization of a superior replacement 21 years ago, which subsequently achieved near-complete market penetration a decade or so ago.

Fossil can be one of the many little mammals that help take down the Excel and Git dinosaurs, but I cannot see it ever turning into the "human race" of DVCS products and overrunning the planet.

(2.1)<br>By Brian Tiffin (btiffin) on 2019-07-21 16:10:52 edited from 2.0<br>in reply to 1<br>[link]<br>[source]

Even though I find Fossil to be a far more rewarding experience, Git did one thing that few technologies ever have done (any?). Across platforms, across development models, across the entire programming field, a majority of programmers now have a point of common interest, Git. 97% of programmers may only ever use a thin layer of monkey-see monkey-do subcommands and Git..b hand holder websites, but the technology is of common interest. As a profession, we should aim for more of those.

So, learn enough Git to not be left out of the common conversations, and then use Fossil. :-)

Edit: Just as I pressed Submit I realized that SQLite may count as another of the rare ubiquitous technologies, putting Fossil only one small step away from the greatness of a globally accepted point of common interest.

(3)<br>By Steve Schow (Dewdman42) on 2019-07-21 17:50:30 in reply to 1<br>[link]<br>[source]

Unfortunately this is probably true. Git is everywhere. There is as LOT that I like better about fossil, but the truth is that if git included a ticket and wiki system for cheap like fossil does, I would probably switch over to the dark side and use git just in order to be compatible with all the git hooks that are everywhere these days. They are in IDE's, they are on GitHub and other sites, they are just everywhere. If you want to get along with most of the...