[itohihiyt]

Came here for a martial arts tutorial, which I thought was a bit weird to see front page on HN, and now I see an alternative to git.

I don't particularly like git and for personal projects use fossil instead.

Without going through the whole tutorial, and doing a lot more reading, why should I consider using this over fossil?

[abc123abc123]

Interesting. I'm not a professional developer and also love fossil for toy/hobby projects. I find it fascinating that this well crafted, solid piece of software is so forgotten, and that git has just rolled over everything.

[otherme123]

Same here, the fact that it includes bug tracker, web UI and wiki/docs is a huge plus.

[thiht]

Honestly you could sell me the best alternative to Git that exists and I still wouldn’t switch, or even try it. I don’t care enough about my versioning system to use something else than what everybody uses. Ubiquity beats convenience.

What I care about is the tooling around it: GitHub and its ecosystem mainly. I also want my open source projects to be on GitHub specifically, and I don’t want to ask contributors to use something other than Git.

[steveklabnik]

Totally respect you wanting to not care about tools, but for the latter part, I do agree with you, which is why I like jj: it uses a git repo as its backing store, so your projects can live on GitHub and all the rest of your collaborators can use git. Nobody else needs to know or care.

[thiht]

Wow I’ve heard about jj multiple times before but didn’t realize it was compatible with Git. You got me interested in just 1 sentence, nicely done!

Well, guess I’m on my way to read the tutorial.

[steveklabnik]

Glad to hear it! It’s a killer feature, for sure.

[tmtvl]

Yeah, I was also wondering 'Traditional JJ or BJJ?'

I've never really messed around with VCSes other than git and Subversion, there's people who really like Mercurial though, so I wonder how jj compares to that.

[kettleballroll]

Same. I miss the old times when people tried naming their projects sensibly. I mean, we're constantly telling ourselves how variable and function names should speak for themselves, but then we name our projects using random, completely non-descript names. It's a annoying.

[chronial]

Which old times are you referring to / what are "sensible" names?

I thought about it and I don't know what a better name would be. Off the top of my Head, I know Perforce, BitWarden, Subversion, fossil and git. And then the abbreviations CVS, RCS and SVN.

Do any of these qualify as a descriptive name?

[itohihiyt]

As a British national I like to think git is a very descriptive name, because git is a git to use and understand.

[batch12]

For a US southerner it works too. We can use the tool to 'git' our code.

[kettleballroll]

I don't just mean version control systems, but since you mentioned them: CVS (concurrent version system), rcs (revision control system) and subversion all seem fairly descriptive to me?

[phrenq]

At one point in my career, I used Microsoft SourceSafe, which is a pretty descriptive name. Seems like the exception here, though.

[softjobs]

You probably mean BitKeeper. BitWarden is a password / secrets manager.