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.
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Git is freaking amazing. Any current alternative is going to be a joke next to it.
People using other ones are simply missing out. SVN/CVS just need to die.
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.