

Town Car Version Control - danielhfrank
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2013/03/11.html

======
tjbarbour
It's good to see FogCreek being practical and adding in Git support, based on
how strong they were pushing for Mercurial before (Joel even had an online
training[0]) I wouldn't have guessed they would ever switch to Git, but as
Joel said "Religious war: averted." I wish more software would mitigate these
debates with solutions like this, but its often not that easy.

This seems like a cool solution, I don't know if any of the other big
providers are doing synchronized repos, do other similar solutions exist?

[0]<http://hginit.com/>

~~~
famousactress
Devil's advocating, but I worry about solutions like this. Abstractions leak,
and if abstractions like this get traction they splinter tools' abilities to
do useful things. I imagine there are corner cases where git/hg dissonance is
high and wonder if this leads to a situation where we all have to care about
whether a backend is capable of 'full git' or 'hg-compatible git'.

There are places where this is valuable enough to be worthwhile (say.. ANSI
SQL and related high-level-language database agnostic libraries). I'm not
convinced source control is one of those places.

For fogcreek, they bet the farm on hg and are presumably seeing an opportunity
cost to that decision that this mitigates. This makes _loads_ of sense for
them. I'm not convinced it's all that awesome for the rest of us, or for
either the hg or git user bases as a whole.

~~~
bradleyland
Interestingly, Joel (founder of FogCreek, producer of Kiln) wrote extensively
about leaky abstractions:

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html)

------
rrrene
He says Kiln has some advantages over github in the corporate space, while
github has features for socialized open source coding:

    
    
        So, specifically, Kiln gives you corporate things like:
    
        * code reviews
        * access control and permissions
        * fast code search
        * a news feed to follow code you care about
        
        GitHub gives you things that match the sociology of open source projects:
        
        * public home pages
        * a social network, with profiles
        * fork and pull workflow

But doesn't github actually provide at least two of the four points he
mentions for Kiln?

~~~
herge
As somebody who uses hosted kiln, finding and reading code on github is so
much faster it's not even funny. Every time I go to kiln to look at the blame
for a page, I despise it.

The code review tool on kiln is also sub-par compared to the pull-request
review tool in github (and boy is it ugly).

------
j_s
This Kiln ad/blog post conveniently dances around how GitHub also does the
same 'corporate things'.

All version control systems have to support Git these days or they are headed
for irrelevance.

~~~
atirip
Hmm, if i did say that all browsers have to run on Webkit these days or...

~~~
j_s
Getting sidetracked here, but for a real-life example: mobile Firefox
pretending to be Webkit enough to fool certain sites.

[http://alistapart.com/article/the-vendor-prefix-
predicament-...](http://alistapart.com/article/the-vendor-prefix-predicament-
alas-eric-meyer-interviews-tantek-celik)

------
corresation
It has to somewhat hurt that Microsoft just released and is rapidly improving
some quite decent Git support in Visual Studio (and on the server side, Team
Foundation Server).

~~~
j_s
Pardon my ignorance, but Microsoft supporting Git server-side is only if they
host it for you at <http://tfs.visualstudio.com/>, correct?

[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/GitSupportForVisualStudioGitTF...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/GitSupportForVisualStudioGitTFSAndVSPutIntoContext.aspx)

    
    
      > choose either Git or Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) as the source provider
    

[edit: technically also at CodePlex]

~~~
corresation
Indeed, right now Team Foundation Service (the hosted version) has Git
support, however they have promised upcoming support for Team Foundation
Server the self-hosted install.

------
ahoyhere
I can't say I would ever trust my code to a tool written by somebody who
thinks that this is a good idea:

[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/has-joel-spolsky-
ju...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-
shark.html)

Also, calling Github a "VW Microbus" and implying they're hippie kumbaya love-
ins instead of a huge, well-supported tool with the features he implies they
lack… well. It stretches credibility.

~~~
tptacek
Wow, what a terrible comment. I'm surprised to have heard it from you. Witch
hunts against companies that use language development as a tool; what a weird
thing to see voted to the top of an HN thread.

~~~
ahoyhere
Saying "I wouldn't trust my xyz to a person who does abc" is not a witchhunt,
it's a statement of opinion based on another person's very public and
controversial choices.

Am I not allowed to find cross-compiling to PHP, ASP and vbscript technically
questionable?

Or be wary that their founder claims that one of their apps has "literally
millions" of calculations on a single page?

That just seems like exercising discretion. Just like everyone does when some
free service turns draconian and some HNers complain and other HNers say "Well
look what they did to their last startup / look what these other free services
always end up as, you should have seen the pattern matching on the wall." I
believe you've left a few comments to that effect, yourself. Where do you see
a difference?

Note that _I_ didn't call their app some kind of ridiculous and insulting car
metaphor or deliberately leave off features in order to smear them… if we're
going to talk about witchhunts.

~~~
tptacek
You're allowed to call a cross-compiling language questionable, and I'm
allowed to call you out for suggesting that the application of basic computer
science is a sign of incompetence.

