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Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

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Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#211

Post by adrianmsmith »

tenken wrote: post #109
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.

Bit Git isn't great for audit trails given that you can go back and alter previous commits, in contrast to pretty much any other VCS, including Subversion and Fossil.

(I know, technically, altering commits creates new commits in Git, but it comes to the same thing.)

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#212

Post by aledalgrande »

dhash wrote: post #79
romwell wrote: post #58

When people talk about killer features missing in Git, there is more beyond the UX and mono/poly repo. One thing is code review. There is no code review in Git. What I expect in 2020 is that I should be able to specify reviewers for the commit (which I pick out of a list of people who can approve it). These people should be able to leave comments on the commit. I should be able to both respond to comments and modify…

Iron [1] definitely has the right idea. Code review comments really should live next to the code, and proper editor integration goes a really long way. Traditional review processes make “just fixing the code” have a very high inertia. [1] https://blog.janestreet.com/ironing-out-your-release-process...

Thanks for this one, really nice read.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#213

Post by brylie »

tasuki wrote: post #199

> I worry that Git might be the last mass-market DVCS within my lifetime. The possibility of git being the last mass-market DVCS within my lifetime leaves me with warm fuzzy feelings. Git is simple and elegant, though its interface might not be.

The interface is arguably the most important part. I.e. it is a tool developed for humans to use, so would ideally have simple, consistent, and by extension intuitive ergonomics. Elegance of internal implementation is secondary.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#214

Post by petre »

interfixus wrote: post #195

For what it's worth, the linked page is itself running on Fossil, which has of course build in forum facilities and several other suchlike goodies - being a complete solution, packed into a single smallish executable with no significant dependencies apart from SQLite. The Fossil site runs on very moderate hardware, and gets no hiccups from hitting the HN frontpage. I like this kind of untroubled minimalism, and so fa…

We use Fossil as well @work and we love it, although I don't think it's not the best choice for huge codebases such as the FreeBSD ports tree which I tried to import once to see how it scales and gave up after >2Gb and a hour or crunching. Maybe importing into nested repositories would work better?

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#215

Post by squiggleblaz »

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…

The only way I've ever successfully `git clone`d my work repo is from another locally connected device. Even with shallow and then gradually unshallowing it, it will not generally complete before the internet falls over.

Nowadays, a new computer means a git clone (or just plain copy-paste) of a USB stick from the old one. This seems like it's a single feature of git that could be written, but if you told me "there's something that works better for large, twenty year old repos", I'd probably take that.

I don't know how Linux survives, but maybe it's just that you only rarely git clone your large repos. (Or maybe it's just that intercontinental internet is less reliable than intracontinental, so that if you're in the US it's a non issue.)

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#216

Post by matsemann »

tasuki wrote: post #199

> I worry that Git might be the last mass-market DVCS within my lifetime. The possibility of git being the last mass-market DVCS within my lifetime leaves me with warm fuzzy feelings. Git is simple and elegant, though its interface might not be.

People have probably been happy with their tools for centuries. Just because one cannot imagine something better doesn't mean there's no possibility for it to exist. If anything, this defeatist attitude may prove the author right.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#217

Post by rbehrends »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #141

Does Fossil do sub-modules correctly? Specifically does it let you compose a project of several repositories and do configuration management on that repository? That is something git kinda sorta does but it gets out of control easily.

Fossil's intended use case is different from Git's; it was originally built as the VCS for SQLite. In terms of its target audience, it's basically GitHub-in-a-box for small or medium-sized teams. Implementation/usability-wise, it does some things better than Git, does other things worse, and yet others simply different (in a way that some may find better, some may find worse).

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#218

Post by kortilla »

brylie wrote: post #213
tasuki wrote: post #199

> I worry that Git might be the last mass-market DVCS within my lifetime. The possibility of git being the last mass-market DVCS within my lifetime leaves me with warm fuzzy feelings. Git is simple and elegant, though its interface might not be.

The interface is arguably the most important part. I.e. it is a tool developed for humans to use, so would ideally have simple, consistent, and by extension intuitive ergonomics. Elegance of internal implementation is secondary.

The interface can be swapped out if the underlying storage is fine. There is nothing preventing you from writing a different front end where “checkout” doesn’t do all the things.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#219

Post by rossmohax »

nsomaru wrote: post #207
rtpg wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scaling isn't even just about number of files or size of them. A problem I've hit is just in having cross-repo stuff work well. Monorepos are helpful partly because git submodules are not ideal for good workflows, and splitting stuff across multiple git repos can backfire (it doesn't help that almost all the tooling around CI and the like is repo-based instead of project based). I would love a layer over Git to handl…

Sub modules have terrible UX and are completely counterintuitive. Subtrees work well for my small repos when I need to vendor something in

There is also a git subrepo from subtree author, worth checking out IMHO

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#220

Post by jeltz »

kemitche wrote: post #120
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 disagree that Git's biggest flaw is its lack of scalability. Cases where git needs to scale tend to be isolated to companies that have the manpower to build a finely-tuned replacement (see: MS, Google). Git's flaws are primarily in usability/UX. But I think for its purpose, functionality is far more important than a perfect UX. I'm perfectly happy knowing I might have to Google how to do something in Git as long as…

Maybe I am a weirdo but I have always thought that git's UI is very intuitive (with some exceptions like sub modules). SVN on the other hand was an unintutive mess where I had to look up commands all the time.
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