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Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?

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Re: Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?

#241

Post by iggldiggl »

Izkata wrote: post #229
martinvonz wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that Mercurial has a simpler UX than Git without being less powerful. I think Jujutsu (see other posts here), which I started, also has simpler UX and is more powerful than Git in many ways. Have you looked at either of those?

About a decade ago, I tried both mercurial and git, and at the time had only subversion knowledge. I remember finding mercurial extremely confusing and git very simple, but don't remember the details about why mercurial was confusing.

Whereas conversely I was glad that with Mercurial I no longer had to deal with Git's staging area (for me, Mercurial's interactive commit serves the same purpose).

Re: Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?

#242

Post by estiaan »

Different perspective: We absolutely can do better than git… for non-text files that can’t be merged or stored as a sequence of diffs

I (briefly) looked into using git as an alternative to PDM for solidworks CAD files and it turns out git is absolutely not a good fit for this use case. Not surprisingly, I mean it wasn’t designed for that at all.

Point remains though that the world needs a better version control system, something like git, but that works with non text files, because boy do the actual solutions I’ve tried suck compared to the git experience

Software engineers are so lucky to have such a powerful tool for free, mechanical engineers or their companies pay tens of thousands of dollars for version control software that is far worse

PDM is a bit more than just version control but the version control is what my company wants and it’s so painful

Re: Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?

#243

Post by JonChesterfield »

Git views the codebase as mutable. It's really well set up for changing the historical record to reflect how you wish it had been done. This is necessary for large team dev efforts - it means the history is mostly a sequence of atomic changes to functionality or code structure, with some reverts when CI judged the patch inadequate.

Fossil views the historical record as immutable. Your sequences of mistakes, iteration, failed experiments are all diligently recorded. I like that, means I get to revisit missteps and abandoned branches later. However it is clearly a scaling hazard. I don't want to see the incremental hacking around of a thousand other people. Nor would I want to prohibit that sort of exploration.

My personal work is in fossil repos, going back a decade across various operating systems and versions of fossil. It has literally never let me down.

Re: Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?

#244

Post by EstanislaoStan »

karmakaze wrote: post #135
tester756 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do it then. Many have tried. All have failed. Talk is cheap. I'm, just like many other people using GitHub Desktop (or Git Kraken or Git Extension, but I dont like this one) when I'm working in GUI environment, that's proof that it is possible. The problem with creating 3rd party tool that's CLI wrapper is that you cannot rely on it being installed on the system. That's why such solutions usually fail - because you…

Is gitk still a thing that's available with git? Not as full featured but great for viewing and good with many commits/files.

Yes

Re: Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?

#245

Post by mistercheph »

etrautmann wrote: post #97
aulin wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine an electronic engineer complaining about an oscilloscope being hard to use because he cannot explain what all those knobs do to his wife. We are professionals, our tools should be powerful for the advanced user, not beginner friendly.

Yes, but if the oscilloscope has some buttons that take out the entire company’s codebase if pressed wrong.

If the entire company's work has been laid up into a single prototype, then an oscilloscope does have such buttons :)

Re: Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?

#246

Post by [deleted] »

Apreche wrote: post #77

A lot of people these days have just been thrown into the fire with Git as the first and only VCS they’ve ever seen. I’m not that old, but I’m old enough to have used RCS, CVS, SVN, then finally Git. I started using Git super early, before GitHub existed. You may not believe me, but Git was the answer to all my prayers. All those previous systems had fundamental architectural flaws that made them a complete nightmare…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?

#247

Post by rendall »

trevyn wrote: post #160
blibble wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the rename won't be in your history because the tree and commit objects don't support renames the tooling infers a rename based on the lack of a content change

Is there a difference?

I've had one or two really annoying merges that were complicated by these renames. TIL thanks to these responses that it's not actually a rename.

Re: Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?

#248

Post by LeBleu »

screye wrote: post #189
briHass wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally don't hear too many complaints about GIT in the Windows/.NET development world, probably because there are good UI front ends and there's not as much 'tough guy' cred from sticking to the CLI. Visual Studio does a decent job of abstracting the GIT nuances, but I personally use GIT Extensions, which looks and feels much better on Windows than the other cross platform UIs. I drop to the CLI occasionally, es…

Vs code + git graph + git lens is all you need for a happy git experience.

This! Any graphical history for git that doesn't let you show all branches at once is trash. (Like the one in Visual Studio) The interactive rebase editor in Git Graph is very nice too.

I also love how smoothly you can jump between git CLI and GUI in VS Code.

I'll have to look at how to compare arbitrary commits in Git Lens and whether it is in the free version. That's the one thing I still rely upon TortoiseGit for

Re: Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?

#249

Post by yencabulator »

baazaa wrote: post #221
mlsu wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All software construction involves essential tasks, the fashioning of the complex conceptual structures that compose the abstract software entity, and accidental tasks, the representation of these abstract entities in programming languages and the mapping of these onto machine languages within space and speed constraints. Git solves the deeply complex problem of distributed version control. Most complaints about git…

Totally agree that people spend way too much time complaining about git's solutions but there's not nearly enough criticism of the fact it's solving the wrong problem 99% of the time. I want to share 5k LOC with a colleague. Anyone who thinks that requires a decentralised solution in 2023 is unwell. I recently wasted a few hours because I forgot to fetch before running some code. Sure the UI could be better (if you'r…

What you fail to understand is that, outside of all talk about decentralization, keeping local state is a huge performance optimization. Tagging a large CVS tree used to take several minutes, because it would talk to the remote server separately about every file. History browsing & bisect are very pleasant in Git because the local computer already has all the information, and just needs to present it to you.

Re: Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?

#250

Post by grecy »

Apreche wrote: post #77

A lot of people these days have just been thrown into the fire with Git as the first and only VCS they’ve ever seen. I’m not that old, but I’m old enough to have used RCS, CVS, SVN, then finally Git. I started using Git super early, before GitHub existed. You may not believe me, but Git was the answer to all my prayers. All those previous systems had fundamental architectural flaws that made them a complete nightmare…

> I’m old enough to have used RCS, CVS, SVN, then finally Git

I'm old enough to have used CVS, SVN and then a bit of git.

I remember the big selling point to go from CVS to SNV was "you can put binaries in there!" ... which we never did.

And now I see the selling point to go from SNV to Git is "you can do really complicated stuff like rebase".... which we've never done.

For a team who just does run of the mill distributed version control stuff (commits, diffs, blame, conflict resolution), can you explain why git is such a huge benefit over SVN?

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