Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#101

Post by thayne » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 5:17 AM UTC

phodge wrote: post #94

jayd16 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't see any obvious flaws with Git. Large files and long histories hinder its total dominance in the game and art industries. Because of git's shortcomings polyrepo is a near necessity not simply a stylistic choice. LFS is a bolt on solution that could/should have better support.

> Because of git's shortcomings polyrepo is a near necessity I'm intrigued by this claim. I've come to the opposite conclusion - that monorepo is near necessity with git because there's no tools for branching/rebasing multiple repos at once.

After using both I can say both have problems. Polyrepos lack tools for working with multiple repos simultaneously, and require more attention to versioning. Monorepos have longer histories, and the large number of objects can hurt performance.

Which one you should use depends on which downsides are less impactful for your use case.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#102

Post by dilap » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 5:17 AM UTC

hn_acc_1 wrote: post #38

ken wrote: post #19

Every version control system that's become dominant in my lifetime became popular because it fixed a major obvious flaw in the previous dominant system (RCS, CVS, SVN). From where I sit, Git has a couple obvious flaws, and I expect its successor will be the one that fixes one of them. The most obvious (and probably easiest) is the monorepo/polyrepo dichotomy.

I don't see any obvious flaws with Git. The monorepo/polyrepo discussion exists apart from your choice of version control system and has little to do with Git, as far as I can tell

cherry picking is a shitshow!

i would love to be able to use a patch-based VC.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#103

Post by kjgkjhfkjf » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 5:17 AM UTC

Eventually git will be replaced by something better. It might not be replaced everywhere, but eventually it will be replaced in most places. This is true of almost all things in tech.

I expect that git's eventual replacement will initially boast compatibility with existing git repos.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#104

Post by duskwuff » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 5:20 AM UTC

codazoda wrote: post #63

kstrauser wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone's has their own tastes and preferences, of course, and I respect that yours is different than mine. That said, I used and loved CVS and then SVN for years and didn't get why all the kids were fussing around with this new Git thing. I finally made myself try it for about a week. At the end of that experiment, I ported all my repos from SVN to Git and quickly set to purging all Subversion-related knowledge fro…

I actually LIKED having a central repository, which many of us still seem to prefer (i.e. GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket). I switched to git mainly because my colleagues were all using it. I found it difficult to use, at first, because of my expectation of a central repo. Many years in, however, I see extreme value in having all your history locally. Specifically, never having to worry about a server crashing or your "hos…

Having history available locally also means you can perform interesting operations on history -- like "git blame" -- without making the server do all the heavy lifting.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#105

Post by taspeotis » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 5:20 AM UTC

If you take a look at Subversion vs. Git's interest on Google [1] and you agree it has some correspondence to the technology adoption lifecycle [2] ... Git's got a long way to go.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#106

Post by james_s_tayler » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 5:23 AM UTC

comex wrote: post #48

Git's biggest flaw is that it doesn't scale. If a new system can fix that without sacrificing any of Git's benefits, I think it can topple Git. It's ironic that Git was popularized in the same era as monorepos, yet Git is a poor fit for monorepos. There have been some attempts to work around this. Google's `repo` command is a wrapper around Git that treats a set of smaller repos like one big one, but it's a (very) le…

I'd say the number of git repos on Earth that would encounter problems of that nature would be a vanishingly microscopic minority. Sure, it's a problem for those companies but it's not a problem for anyone else.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#107

Post by 734129837261 » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 5:24 AM UTC

I wish there was a version control system that didn't need user input beyond a "push". Only branches and pull requests, nothing more. No commit messages, you have one master branch and however many sub-branches you need.

Whatever code is in your branch is what it is. And then there's a layer of magic on top of it all, maybe a UI or command line tool or both, just to be able to easily rewind time. Either per file, per line of code, or folder, or just a folder but not recursive, or the entire branch.

Think of Apple's Time Machine, it should be that simple.

Honestly, I rarely–if ever–read commit messages to begin with. The way I navigate older code is never done by searching for commit messages. That's not reliable.

Instead I simply go to a point in time where I think the thing I'm looking for might be. I'll look at the code, recognise its state, and continue the search up or down the timeline.

And that would cover the needs of most projects I'd say. And it would save us a shitload of time.

Hell, I've been working with git for almost a decade now. I never needed to rebase or merge things, until I recently did need to do it. It's too arcane to make intuitive sense, to me anyway.

Git is good, I'd just welcome a breath of fresh air...

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#108

Post by pg_is_a_butt » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 5:25 AM UTC

kjgkjhfkjf wrote: post #103

Eventually git will be replaced by something better. It might not be replaced everywhere, but eventually it will be replaced in most places. This is true of almost all things in tech. I expect that git's eventual replacement will initially boast compatibility with existing git repos.

Anything that could maintain compatibility with git repos after an initial import process couldn't possibly be any better than git.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#109

Post by tenken » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 5:27 AM UTC

734129837261 wrote: post #107

I wish there was a version control system that didn't need user input beyond a "push". Only branches and pull requests, nothing more. No commit messages, you have one master branch and however many sub-branches you need. Whatever code is in your branch is what it is. And then there's a layer of magic on top of it all, maybe a UI or command line tool or both, just to be able to easily rewind time. Either per file, per…

Do you work on a team? Or in a job were you need to have an audit trail for your work? Commit messaged and many other features of Git like branching and tags are indespensible for sharing and collaborating on code.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#110

Post by HALtheWise » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 5:27 AM UTC

thenewnewguy wrote: post #81

rhabarba wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see any obvious flaws with Git. Merge conflicts.

Merge conflicts are a part of any VCS that allows two people to edit the same file at the same time.

However, in some cases (like non-mergeable binary files), it is actually better to have a system that allows one user to take a lock on a file and have exclusive editing abilities. The git protocol has no support for those workflows, and so people end up using a Google Doc or something to track who is modifying what file. Definately a place for improvement.