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Git: The 'it' technology for software version control

Developers are taking a strong liking to the distributed system, though Subversion and others remain in the game

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Mercurial, which is open source like Git and Subversion, is more similar than different from Git, says Matt Mackall, Mercurial's primary author and project leader. "They're both designed for speed and they're both inspired by the design of an earlier system called Monotone, so they have a lot in common architecturally."

However, he says, Mercurial is generally designed to be easier to use. "If you're coming from CVS or SVN [the common shorthand for Subversion], it should seem fairly familiar. Mercurial wins some performance benchmarks and Git wins others. Windows folks tell me Mercurial works much better there." Mackall believes both projects have similarly strong communities, with both being sizable, diverse, and active.

Git is on a roll, but has a long way to dominance
Git has gained a lot of important adherents, with major adopters including the Ruby on Rails project, the Debian OS effort, and the Linux kernel. Developers clearly are taking a liking to the platform. But there are still plenty of users of other technologies, such as Mercurial and Subversion, as Eclipse's survey reveals.

Whether Git can maintain its momentum long enough to dominate and perhaps become an industry standard before some other technology comes along remains to be seen. But for now at least, Git is on a roll.

This story, "Torvalds's Git: The 'it' technology for software version control," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in application development at InfoWorld.com. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.


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