[Monotone-devel] Re: user-friendly hash formats, redux

[graydon hoare]

I agree with what you wrote about adapting to human preferences. 
whole-heartedly. but something else you said felt like something I ought 
to reply to..

Nathan Myers wrote:

> No, we're _not_ doing OK.  We are falling farther and farther behind 
> Arch and Subversion.  Arch is held back mainly by its incidental 
> weirdnesses in, e.g., file name conventions.  In public discussion 
> on SCM systems, Monotone is rarely more than a footnote.  Even Darcs 
> gets more respect!

I used to worry a lot about this. it was a hard thing for me to swallow 
any evidence that I wasn't working on The One True VC System. but as 
time passed, I have come to accept that this space is big enough for an 
ecology of competitors. that the factors will shift from time to time, 
person to person, and project to project, to favour one or the other.

there is some sort of population-genetics equation defining the number 
of competitors which can coexist in a niche. it is something related to 
network effects, size of the niche, amount of variation in the niche, 
barriers to entry of new competitors, and "inertial" costs of 
maintaining and adapting large general competitors -vs- small 
specialized competitors.

I'm not any longer convinced that this equation *forces* a bottleneck 
future on us in which there is only one distributed VC system. I used to 
think the network effects alone would cause it, but I'm no longer 
convinced there's as much opportunity for direct code sharing as all 
that. my current feeling is that there's probably room for a few 
different distributed VC systems, for the forseeable future.

(cf. the continuing existence of different character sets, filesystems, 
programming languages, free unix clones, instruction sets, web browsers, 
mail clients, IRC programs, text editors, regular expression syntaxes, etc.)

-graydon