On Sun, Feb 03, 2008 at 01:00:57AM +0000, Junichi Uekawa wrote:

Hi,


When I was idly googling around for traces of VCS and popularity,
noticed that Git is actually pretty popular.  Googling for 'gitweb'
and 'viewcvs' and other comparative web-frontend variants floating in
the cyberspace I get these number of hits (in rough estimate) :

10000000 CVS
1000000 SVN
100000 Git
10000 Mercurial / Darcs
1000 Bzr

This is crude, and I'm sure someone else will come up with a better
estimate. The point is, when there are so many users, people don't
read the lists or the changelog, but rely on manuals, and be surprised
with this change.

  http://www.google.com/trends?q=svn%2C+git%2C+mercurial%2C+bzr%2C+darcs&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

  :)

I was wondering why I use the git-xxx format so much (in muscle, and
in scripts). And realized I have the following reasons:

1. That's the form documented in the manual pages (generated from asciidoc)

2. That's the name manual pages are in.

3. Linus said it's better (3 years ago), and I thought so too.
   (Situation has changed, bash has better completion for 'git'
   commands, so that's no longer valid)

4. There was a GNU Interactive Tools with the same name 'git', so it
was better to avoid confusion then. (This is still the case with
Debian, where the sysadmin can choose whether to make 'git' (GNU
Interactive Tools) the default, or our beloved git.

5. There are many documentations floating around.

6. I'm used to it.

  Yes, but your aliases are not usable through git-foo, only git foo is.
So for consistency reasons, non dashed versions are better.

  And one could in the future have builtin commands without the
corresponding git-foo and git-bar either. I'm thinking
git-revert/git-cherry-pick that use _exactly_ the same code and code
objects, hence having the two binary is somehow a waste of space.
git-log variants are the same, and so on. I'm not saying this _will_ be
done, TTBOMK it has not even been discussed, but that may happen at some
point.

-- 
·O·  Pierre Habouzit
··O                                                madcoder@debian.org
OOO                                                http://www.madism.org