Two well-written and interesting articles that both touch on path dependence in the evolution of software:

http://adamierymenko.com/privileged-ports-are-causing-climate-change/

https://redfin.engineering/two-commits-that-wrecked-the-user-experience-of-git-f0075b77eab1

Good discussions going on where @dthompson shared them:

https://toot.cat/users/dthompson/updates/36745

https://toot.cat/users/dthompson/updates/36819

The redfin post ends up recommending https://people.gnome.org/~newren/eg/ , which reminds me I still haven't had a look at http://gitless.com/ , which is the same but different.


Speaking of git, wouldn't it have been great if I could have just made this a Merge Reply to both of Dave's posts? Now I just made an independent post, because I don't think it belongs more to either discussion.

Of course the UI considerations of Merge Reply are daunting. Or maybe they aren't: # is doing a pretty good job of handling complex reply trees by flattening yet providing context links and popups. In that kind of interface, just adding another parent link isn't a biggie.