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Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

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848 points thefilmore | 7 comments | 13 May 25 05:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.415s | source | bottom
1. phire ◴[13 May 25 07:23 UTC] No.43970419[source]▶
People have forgotten just how bad centralised version control was in 2005.

If you weren't connected to the internet, you couldn't do a thing. You couldn't checkout. You couldn't commit. You could create branches. The only thing on your computer was whatever you checked out last time you were connected to the server.

People talk about SVN, but it wasn't that common in 2005. None of the project hosting platforms (like SourceForge) supported SVN, they were all still offering CVS. If you wanted to use SVN, you had to set it up on your own server. (From memory, google code was the first to offer SVN project hosting in mid-2006). Not that SVN was much better than CVS. It was more polished, but shared all the same workflow flaws.

Before Git (and friends), nothing like pull-requests existed. If you wanted to collaborate with someone else, you either gave them an account on your CVS/SVN server (and then they could create a branch and commit their code), or they sent you patch files over email.

The informal email pull requests of git were an improvement... though you still needed to put your git repo somewhere public. Github and its web-based pull requests were absolutely genius. Click a button, fork the project, branch, hack, commit, push, and then create a formal "pull request". It was nothing like centralised project management systems before it. A complete breath of fresh air.

replies(3): >>43970667 #>>43970673 #>>43971591 #
2. guappa ◴[13 May 25 08:12 UTC] No.43970667[source]▶
A patch over email is how git works too!
3. chgs ◴[13 May 25 08:13 UTC] No.43970673[source]▶
Pull requests aren’t part of git. They are a feature of one implementation.
replies(2): >>43971066 #>>43971104 #
4. dezgeg ◴[13 May 25 09:18 UTC] No.43971066[source]▶
git request-pull is.
5. phire ◴[13 May 25 09:24 UTC] No.43971104[source]▶
This 2007 talk [1] of Linus Torvalds promoting git to Google was how many people were introduced to the concept of git in those days before GitHub, I remember watching it myself. Emails requesting other maintains to pull your branch was very much the suggested workflow around git.

And it was actually part of git. Even back in 2005, git included a script git request pull that generated these pull request emails. I'm pretty sure people called these emails "pull requests" before GitHub came along.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

6. lupusreal ◴[13 May 25 10:59 UTC] No.43971591[source]▶
I am sure Sourceforge supported subversion by 2007 or 2008, I had a project there then. When was it added?
replies(1): >>43972023 #
7. phire ◴[13 May 25 12:12 UTC] No.43972023[source]▶
It's hard to find dates for that type of thing (especially with sourceforge, their website seems actively mess with the wayback machine). But I dug deeper, apparently Sourceforge got support for SVN in 2006, which is a few months before google code.

2006 appears to be the year that SVN finally became somewhat mainstream, which is interesting because git was released in 2005. Github launched in 2008 and by 2009, everyone seemed to be abandoning SVN.

It feels like SVN was only really "mainstream" for about 3 years, Maybe 5 years at most; There was some early-adopter lead-up and then a long tail of repos refusing to switch to git.