[Sparkle] LaunchPad + Bazaar vs. Lighthouse + Git[Hub]

[David Symonds]

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 5:51 PM, Andy Matuschak <andy at andymatuschak.org> wrote:

> You're definitely right, Chris—Git's neat, and SVN is absolutely terrible.
> I'm not considering keeping SVN; that's not one of the options. I'm just
> trying to choose between Git and Bazaar. The speed difference is more or
> less negligible, Bzr has all of Git's neat features, and LaunchPad does more
> or less the same stuff as GitHub. Then all the other stuff in the lists.
>
> So keeping in mind that I think Git is neat, is there any good reason I
> should choose it over Bazaar given the list of advantages and disadvantages
> in the original email?

My 2 cents from a Git user (and occasional contributor) why you should
use Git over Bazaar:

- Bazaar still uses that daft notion of branches-as-directories that
makes SVN and Perforce painful.
- Git is under more active development (from what I can tell).
- Bazaar is implemented in Python, so it's a bit slower and less portable.
- Bazaar doesn't do rebasing, so development against old versions need
to be merged or hand-updated.
- Git's "unfriendly" SHA-1 identifiers aren't unfriendly in practice,
since you can abbreviate them or use relative commit addressing as
well. Lightweight tagging also makes it ridiculously easy to do
complex manipulations with whatever terms you want to use.
- Bazaar is relatively lesser known. Any given random developer is
much more likely to know Git.

Overall, I think Git often _appears_ to be confusing, but it becomes
quite natural and flexible once you're immersed in it and using it,
just like riding a bike.



Dave.