Source Control Management (SCM) Systems, have a long and rich history. As the systems evolved, so have their concepts, use cases and adoption over time. While SCMs are ubiquitous in modern software development, they have been fairly novel in the 80s and 90s, and arguable it took the rise of Git and Github for them to be used nearly everywhere.

When the author searched for comparisons of Version Control Systems,
they found many links from Perforce themselves. These links largely
dismiss other version control systems, and tell the viewer to use
Perforce's own system.

When the author searched "helix core vs svn", they again found results
from Perforce - which is fine, the query now involves their product.
What is not fine, is that Perforce continues to make bold claims,
and they continue to provide no data at all to support those claims.
Perforce now bases these claims on "conventional wisdom", which the
author finds to be un-scientific.

I've been working with git now full-time for around a decade now.
I use it every day, relying on the command-line version primarily.
I've read a book, watched talks, practiced with it and in general
use it effectively to get my job done.
I even have a custom collection of hooks I install in new repos to
help me stay on the happy path. I should like it, based on mere
exposure effect alone. I don't.

First, I tried Googling the answer and found the following definitive blog post: https://engineering.fb.com/2014/01/07/core-infra/scaling-mercurial-at-facebook/ The ten-year-old write-up, along with some later YouTube tech talks, gave me a starting answer: “because performance.”

But I wanted to go deeper and hear from the original deciding engineers. With the help of a teammate, I posted a question on the ex-Facebookers group asking about the history. I also cold-emailed two of the original engineers working on the project to migrate onto Mercurial - they were kind enough to call me off the record and give personal accounts of the project.

So I asked about people’s favourite git config options on Mastodon:

As usual I got a TON of great answers and learned about a bunch of very popular git config options that I’d never heard of.

I am going to tell you why I don’t think you should sign your Git commits, even though doing so with SSH keys is now easier than ever. But first, to contextualize my objection, I have a brief hypothetical for you, and then a bit of history from the evolution of security on the web.

But let's take a step back and review the past 25 years leading to this decision.

An fairly comprehensive overview of the pros and cons of 4 different version control systems in the context of video game development.

The Apache Subversion Blog is a collection of articles concerning the design and usage of Subversion.

The diff3 algorithm is widely considered the gold standard for merging
uncoordinated changes to list-structured data such as text files.
Surprisingly, its fundamental properties have never been studied in
depth. We offer a simple, abstract presentation of the diff3 algorithm
and investigate its behavior. Despite abundant anecdotal evidence that
people find diff3’s behavior intuitive and predictable in practice,
characterizing its good properties turns out to be rather delicate: a
number of seemingly natural intuitions are incorrect in general. Our
main result is a careful analysis of the intuition that edits to
“well-separated” regions of the same document are guaranteed never to
conflict.

The goal of those documents is to provide an implementation path for adding fediverse capabilities to Gitlab.