For those who don't know, in software for tracking file versions (VCS - version control system), a commit is a single version increment. VCS when hosted on the internet or corporate network allows collaboration among multiple individuals who work simultaneously on potentially same files. Even for one man teams it offers a benefit of jumping to older versions and recovering files when an unfortunate disaster destroys a computer or when something gets deleted accidentally. In case of Stareater VCS mostly tracks changes in code files but sometimes it has to deal with binary files like images.
Long development not only brought multiple rewrites of the game but also saw multiple versioning systems. Hopefully whole history from the first system was retained in the current one. First iteration (WhyNot) was not tracked by any VCS but the second iteration was tracked with SVN on Google Project Hosting (GPH) about half way through. SVN was first VCS I learned to work with and it was a bit clunky. It worked well when there were ordinary file creations, deletions and updates. File renaming would pose it a problem and folder renaming would freak it out and require delicate order of operations to get it through. The project was only 53 commits in when a friend told me about Mercurial (or Hg as it was frequently referred) and that GPH can seamlessly convert SVN repository to Hg. This VCS was easier to work with, renaming was not a headache anymore which was proven 77 commits later when the time came for the second rewrite where, among other things, whole file structure got reworked.
It served me well for 283 more commits when Google announced they'll retire their Project Hosting. They were slowly killing the service by first removing very useful "Updates" page (code changes and issue reports overview) and later on preventing upload of new releases in "Downloads" page until in 2015 they informed their user to find an alternative. That's when GitHub got plenty of new users and I with Stareater was one of them. It's very similar to Hg in how it works conceptually but in practice I had to go outside my comfort zone: I had to learn command line.
With all shortcomings SVN had a good GUI client and Windows Explorer integration. GUI for Hg was on similar level too but Git client despite looking similar didn't click with me. One provided by GitHub was and still is, to put it mildly, a garbage. It has custom non-WinForms interface, uses unreasonable amount of resources (probably just to run fancy interface) and one "Sync" button mentality which only works in trivial cases. Fortunately in the mean time I learned to use Git from command line on the job (the real one) and I started to use "Open in Git shell" button as often as "Sync". And that's where the project is now, 582 commits on GitHub and 1000 commits in total. I hope to see version 1.0 in less then 2000 commits :).
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