We need a new generation of source control • Hacker News Board

Re: We need a new generation of source control

#31

Post by maerF0x0 » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:03 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #26

hliyan wrote: post #19

Are we mistaking a dependency control problem as a revision control problem? In a previous life, before microservices, CI/CD etc. existed, we did just fine with 20-30 CVS repositories, each representing a separate component (a running process) in a very large distributed system. The only difference was that we did not have to marshal a large number of 3rd party dependencies that were constantly undergoing version cha…

You’re not wrong. Part of it is the willingness of people to reach for a dependency that amounts to a few lines of code to avoid. It would be nice if there was a tool that could help you identify just how much of each dependency you actually depend on so you could trim it.

one of the go proverbs is a little copying is better than a little dependency. [1]

Also go vendoring tools usually trim the repos down to the packages you import.

[1]: https://go-proverbs.github.io/

Re: We need a new generation of source control

#32

Post by ljm » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:03 PM UTC

arianvanp wrote: post #22

The argument of why monorepos suck seems to largely rely on "CI Sucks" in this article. But I beg to differ. Monorepos only work in combination with a build system that tracks dependencies carefully. I contribute a lot to Nixpkgs, which is a monorepo with almost 50000 subcomponents [1], but because the build tool and CI track changes through hashes, changing a package only triggers rebuilds of other packages that dep…

I agree with the first part of this. If by CI you mean something like Circle or Google Cloud Build or Travis, then your CI is pretty much limited to whatever you can fit in a YAML file, and what the CI service will support in that.

YAML in and of itself is not the easiest thing to parse when you have multiple layers of nesting and a lot of lines.

I don't really want to see what a CircleCI config would look like for Nixpkgs.

Once you get to the point of scaling your CI you're looking at tailored infrastructure to make sure you're only building what needs to be built.

Re: We need a new generation of source control

#33

Post by netheril96 » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:04 PM UTC

Google uses a monorepo for most of its code and I find it a much better experience than what I’ve had in the past. But that good experience is predicated on a lot of Google only internal tools. If Google open sources enough of those such that people outside can have the same experience, maybe the debate will end decisively in favor of monorepo.

Re: We need a new generation of source control

#34

Post by kadendogthing » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:05 PM UTC

klodolph wrote: post #7

kadendogthing wrote: post #4

As I've stated in another post on here, what's the point of these articles? It just says everything sucks, but doesn't really dive into why or how we could possibly fix any issues they may directly point out. Also it kind of sounds like the author really doesn't have any idea what GitLab is or does, so maybe he should check it out. But allow me to retort these bald assertions presented in the article: Monorepos are g…

> Git is the best source control system ever. To be clear, I'm not disagreeing. But it is simply not good enough. Any new generation of source control needs to be able to do things that are difficult with Git, and Git simply isn't extensible enough. Microsoft has a Git VFS, and there's Git LFS, but this just doesn't go far enough. There are good technical reasons why you would use Perforce or even Subversion these da…

You have completely missed the point of my post. The point was my post had as much substantial points as the article in question, with less words obviously. Which should be obvious but never get in the way of a good tech contrarian article stating everything sucks I suppose.

Re: We need a new generation of source control

#35

Post by falsedan » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:06 PM UTC

emcq wrote: post #17

hashkb wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are good technical reasons why you would use Perforce or even Subversion days. Can you say more? What are some of those reasons? Or link to some data or examples?

Partial checkouts is the main thing that comes to mind that is better with svn than git.

git archive is ... ok, not pretty great, but it works

Re: We need a new generation of source control

#36

Post by bluGill » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:07 PM UTC

organsnyder wrote: post #29

hliyan wrote: post #19

Are we mistaking a dependency control problem as a revision control problem? In a previous life, before microservices, CI/CD etc. existed, we did just fine with 20-30 CVS repositories, each representing a separate component (a running process) in a very large distributed system. The only difference was that we did not have to marshal a large number of 3rd party dependencies that were constantly undergoing version cha…

My preferred approach for a microservice architecture: - Contract-first API development - All API contract definition files (OpenAPI/Swagger, .proto, .wsdl...) in a single repo, which has a CICD pipeline to bundle them into artifacts for various platforms (Maven, Nuget, NPM, gem...) - Consumers and producers import the "api-contracts" dependency; this is the only coupling between components - Consumers and producers…

I agree with your last point in theory, but in practice consumers start to rely on bugs and implementation details, and eventually it is easier to change the contract that fix the clients.

Re: We need a new generation of source control

#37

Post by klodolph » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:08 PM UTC

jessemillar wrote: post #11

klodolph wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Git is the best source control system ever. To be clear, I'm not disagreeing. But it is simply not good enough. Any new generation of source control needs to be able to do things that are difficult with Git, and Git simply isn't extensible enough. Microsoft has a Git VFS, and there's Git LFS, but this just doesn't go far enough. There are good technical reasons why you would use Perforce or even Subversion these da…

Out of genuine curiosity, do you know of any resources you could point me to to explore specific situations where Git isn't fitting the bill technologically?

The big one is anything that requires locking. Git by nature doesn't support locking.

The next one is repository size. Anything with extremely large history size or checkout size. Very hard to work with using Git. Microsoft has Git VFS. Facebook and Google have modified versions of Mercurial and Git.

High repository velocity. If you are trying to push to a remote and you are always out of sync, it's going to slow you down.

Checking out different commits for different parts of the tree. This one is a bit more rare, it's less common that you'd want this.

Finally, setting ACLs to deny read access to parts of the tree.

For all of these cases, there are some ways you can work around the problem. It's not like you're completely dead in the water with Git, it's not like these things are completely impossible to do in Git. It's just that Git isn't good at everything. It's just that Git is exceptionally good for most people who write code.

Re: We need a new generation of source control

#38

Post by 1023bytes » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:09 PM UTC

I think that Git submodules are to blame. I think that the idea is great, but the implementation is cumbersome. If they were better to use it would solve a lot of these problems.

Re: We need a new generation of source control

#39

Post by falsedan » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:09 PM UTC

klodolph wrote: post #7

kadendogthing wrote: post #4

As I've stated in another post on here, what's the point of these articles? It just says everything sucks, but doesn't really dive into why or how we could possibly fix any issues they may directly point out. Also it kind of sounds like the author really doesn't have any idea what GitLab is or does, so maybe he should check it out. But allow me to retort these bald assertions presented in the article: Monorepos are g…

> Git is the best source control system ever. To be clear, I'm not disagreeing. But it is simply not good enough. Any new generation of source control needs to be able to do things that are difficult with Git, and Git simply isn't extensible enough. Microsoft has a Git VFS, and there's Git LFS, but this just doesn't go far enough. There are good technical reasons why you would use Perforce or even Subversion these da…

> it doesn't have access controls (and there's only so much you can add)

so there's a lot of drawbacks to using gitolite but we were able to customise access controls down to allowing some users the ability to only change lines of checked-in config only to certain values

Re: We need a new generation of source control

#40

Post by kadendogthing » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:09 PM UTC

decebalus1 wrote: post #15

What a bullshit pointless article. And oh god the cringey git wordplay... I'm starting to feel this is basically blogspam.

It IS blog spam. The article doesn't say anything besides "everything sucks." There is not a single constructive point being made besides some fantasy world where our tools are drop dead gorgeous and the build pipelines are well oiled and never have to be paid attention to.