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Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?
41–50 of 309 posts
Re: Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?
#42The inner workings of git are not overly complicated. The real problem is git only provides a thin layer on top of the inner workings. It’s not git that needs replacing, (it’s just saving blobs of data) it’s the user interface on top that is confusing. The problem with simplifying the user interface is that abstracting away the complexity is super difficult.
Not overly complicated, but super difficult to abstract is somewhat of a contradiction. Maybe the inner workings are complicated, but not complicated to implement right once you understand them.
Re: Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?
#43Something that is better should be able to track moves, not just store state. Moves of files and even partial content moved within (text) files. Unfortunately, that needs a tight coupling to the editor, so I doubt that's going to happen.
Re: Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please, Github is so much more than git hosting. If all it offered was source hosting, no one would care for it.
Github isn't all git, but all git is Github.
False. I'm working on two large distributed projects now in git. Neither has anything to do with github.
Re: Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?
#45I more or less consider it a solved problem.
You're mostly going to hear from people here who are annoyed with Git or otherwise more interested in the topic of version control than the median developer. For me, I think it provides a quite robust and well thought-out set of primitives, and then composes them upwards in ways which are about as good as one can expect.
Some stuff obviously isn't well supported. Using the same Git repo to hold large binaries as well as source code is not well supported unless you reach for LFS - that's the biggest downside I see.
Fossil would be my next bet. I'm waiting for someone to make an archaeology.co to rival GitHub.com for it.
Re: Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?
#46Subversion was really good. It wasn't perfect, but it was relatively painless. Instead everyone switched to a "distributed" version control system that is such a pain in the ass it is all now hosted by a single company.
Please, Github is so much more than git hosting. If all it offered was source hosting, no one would care for it.
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Re: Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?
#47There are already various ways in which mercurial or perforce are better than git, and big companies like Google and Meta have hacked on the systems they started with so much that one can hardly say they’re still perforce/hg. There can be disadvantages there but it seems obvious to me that better systems are possible. It feels to me like the real question is whether GitHub is the endgame.
Re: Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?
#48Subversion was really good. It wasn't perfect, but it was relatively painless. Instead everyone switched to a "distributed" version control system that is such a pain in the ass it is all now hosted by a single company.
I recently started a new job that uses SVN, one thing that really catches me out is that it doesn't automatically add new files. Is there some easy trick I am missing to tell SVN to automatically track everything recursively under a folder?
Re: Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?
#49In my opinion the feature Git has always been missing is version control of branches. Of course the immediate consequence would be that you'd be able to roll back changes to branches but there'd be some more fundamental consequences as well. I'm pretty sure some of the problems with GUI's/wrappers around Git break down because there's no tracking of branches/tags. Besides that it's pretty much endgame in my opinion i…
Can you clarify what you mean by "version control of branches"? Branches in Git are just labels of objects. Are you talking about having a history of which objects a branch has previously labelled, like the reflog?
Re: Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?
#50I'm not sure git is so bad that we need something different. It's certainly awkward at times, but it is also mostly a side-tool: not the thing you think of when you think of being a developer, yet every dev uses it.
I suspect most people use just a tiny subset of git day-to-day, and google the rest when it comes up.
For this reason, I think if git is replaced, it won't be because whatever comes along will be better objectively, it will be because a few reasons are touted that most people don't understand but are willing to repeat, and some momentum builds behind the alternative.