Whygitisbetterthan.com, some advocacy from GitHub

[Robert Collins]

On Mon, 2008-12-01 at 16:11 -0500, Elliot Murphy wrote:
> I while I use bzr and launchpad every single day, I really respect the
> work done at GitHub, and just saw this site:
> 
> http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/
> 
> Git is listed as better than bzr in 4 areas:
> 
> - cheap local branching
> - git is fast
> - the staging area
> 
> I don't understand why git is supposed to be better than bzr at cheap
> local branching, perhaps this is a case of not having a shared repo by
> default causes a surface evaluation to make git look better here.

Some people strongly prefer having branches not be real file system
objects; it does seem to make the workflow of 'switch between branches'
more evident when its the default (only!) way of working. We need a
better UI answer here, but certainly a shared treeless repo will perform
pretty fast for making new branches.

> I haven't investigated the claim about speed, but the numbers are posted
> and the benchmarking was done with publicly available branches of the
> django project, so it would be interesting to get confirmation on these.

git is extremely fast locally and with a smart server for networking. It
falls down somewhat when using dumb cloning, but that isn't the most
common use case.

> I disagree with the claim that the staging area makes git better than
> bzr but I can see how it's a subjective thing - for me, shelve works
> great to handle this. Of course, shelve is not in the core commands that
> bzr ships...

It is now :). I think there are rational arguments about the UI impact
of the staging area - the way it is handled makes  git need unbreakme
options - rather than a tool that empowers power-users, its impacts the
entire front end system behaviour.

bzr's shelve is great, but it would be nice to have more to offer there.

-Rob
-- 
GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.
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