Atwood Needs to RTFM on Git
22 Jan
I was listening to the stackoverflow podcast this morning when Jeff Atwood went off on an uninformed rant about the way that github.com works. Jeff was complaining about network graph for the stackoverflow fork of the wmd JavaScript Markdown editor.
Jeff’s complaints showed a fundamental misunderstanding of how distributed source control works. Joel tried to explain to Jeff that in a DVC system forking or cloning a repository doesn’t mean anything unless the fork sends a pull request to the master repository to include its changes. Unfortunately Jeff couldn’t get past the way that github displays project forks on the network graph. If Jeff had spent some time becoming familiar with git and the concepts behind DVC systems the whole conversation wouldn’t have taken place.
Usually Jeff explores a concept in minute detail which is one of the reasons his blog became so popular. In this instance though he perform his usual exploration of a subject and it really showed. I hope he takes some time to become more familiar with DVC systems as they are a real boon to modern software development.
